The Nightbus

This story was posted under the categories: Big Asia Trip, China

We talked about the sleeper train and how it wasn’t as adventurous as we wanted, but since then we’ve been on a sleeper bus and that was a whole different experience

Never having taken one myself in Europe, i was a nightbus virgin as one would say. We purchased our tickets in Shangri La and were due to arrive in Kunming some 12 hours later. As we embarked at around 18h30, we were immediately confronted with the Chinese “urgency”. The seats were numbered which means that everybody was sure to have his own place, still the little people made a dash for it and were fighting for their lives to get into their bed first.

This is when we first laid eyes upon our beds, they were about 50cm wide, allowing for three rows of beds in a bus that was not even larger than a regular city bus. Ines bed was just long enough for her to lie in (about 180cm), while mine was a mere 140cm. I couldn’t even imagine how i was getting in there.

At that point, a nice Chinese guy – who was about the same height as me – saw the misfit and explained that there were still beds available at the back of the bus, where they managed to squeeze in no less than 5 rows, but they were longer and i could lie down in them. Of course, the 5 rows meant that i was sleeping in a space of about 40 cms (there was not enough room for my shoulders) and that i was sleeping in between 2 Chinese.

At first you try to keep in your own space, delimited by iron barriers, but after some hours everybody gives up and you build a relationship with the guys next to you. He puts his leg over yours, you put your arm over his and everybody wins a couple of centimeters. I called it the Chinese One-Night stand.

And that’s how i spent 12 hours – of which i managed to sleep a good 6 – between a snoring machine and another guy who smelled like he had eaten a basket full of garlic. Nevertheless, they were really good guys and they showed me a couple of tricks to make the beds a tad more comfortable

At 7 in the morning, we arrived in Kunming. The weather not being much better than in Shangri La (gray and rainy) we took a cab and headed immediately to the train station, booked a hard seat ticket on the first train out to Guiyang. By heading out into the poorest province of China, we were hoping to evade the hordes of tourist, that have plagued us since the beginning. So after 12 hours of bus, we were embarking half an hour later, for 10 hours of train. Again, the train ride proved to be very pleasant and the hard seater was really comfortable. The seat’s actually not so hard and the chairs are a bit like the Belgian trains had a couple of years ago.

Guiyang itself is located in the Southern part of China and is famous for a couple of things. First of all, it’s China’s most notorious city for theft (not that we noticed anything of it, this city was as safe as any other city we visited). Secondly, it’s in the beginning of the region that has those funky little mountains that you always see in Chinese / Japanese comic books. They look like they have just sprung up out of the ground and there’s thousands of them. But we’ll see much more of it later on when we’ll head for Guilin. Thirdly - and most importantly – the food is again very different from what we’ve seen so far.

To start with, the foodstalls at the station clearly show the poverty of the city: Tofu, pigs feet, pigs snouts, dogs, etc are prepared and sold. Next to those is another Guiyang speciality, chili-flavoured potatos, to us better known as potato chips! So everybody here is actually making their own version of Lays Thai Sweet Chili (our personal favorite type of chips back in Belgium .

Yesterday we visited a park in the city, where monkeys room free and we climbed one of these karst mountains. Today, we’re heading out to Kaili and into distant villages, seeking out minority cultures (mostly Miao) which are famous for still living in ancient and authentic ways.

(still no luck with USB, so still no pictures :-s)