I left Emei Shan in the morning and spent most of the day waiting for the train. After a quick meal of noodles cooked from a small cart on the street in front of the train station, I stood in the undefined line to board the train to Panzhahua (the transfer city I needed to visit on my way to the more interesting Lijiang). As I waited, I noticed my finger was bleeding- dripping onto the cheap tile floor. I didn't have any tissue or napkin, so I asked the guy standing in front of me if he had one. He, a student about my age, and his mother, helped bandage my finger (a bit to my chagrin) and we discovered our seats were next to each other.
He, Chenwei, spoke some very basic English so I sat with his family, crammed in the tiny train cars between other passengers eating fruit and occasionally keeping up a conventional kind of conversation about school and where we were from.
The train plunged forward into the night, screaming along the metal rails. There's little or no purpose trying to sleep with a "hard seat" ticket on a Chinese train. The seats are small and inflexible and every adjacent seat is also full: families like Chenwei's, traveling together with their combined luggage and several plastic bags of food for the journey, slightly older travelers with large gunny sacks and others who couldn't manage to buy a seat
and had to either stand in the narrow aisle, or sit on a small plastic stool they brought themselves.
The trip was long, but Chenwei and his family's stop was the stop of my transfer, and at about 3:30 in the morning, they informed me we'd arrived.
Bidding them goodbye, I waited for the bus station to open.
He, Chenwei, spoke some very basic English so I sat with his family, crammed in the tiny train cars between other passengers eating fruit and occasionally keeping up a conventional kind of conversation about school and where we were from.
The train plunged forward into the night, screaming along the metal rails. There's little or no purpose trying to sleep with a "hard seat" ticket on a Chinese train. The seats are small and inflexible and every adjacent seat is also full: families like Chenwei's, traveling together with their combined luggage and several plastic bags of food for the journey, slightly older travelers with large gunny sacks and others who couldn't manage to buy a seat
and had to either stand in the narrow aisle, or sit on a small plastic stool they brought themselves.
The trip was long, but Chenwei and his family's stop was the stop of my transfer, and at about 3:30 in the morning, they informed me we'd arrived.
Bidding them goodbye, I waited for the bus station to open.
The 12 hour trip from Panzhahua to Lijiang (what I'd been assured was no more than 7) was, if not the most restful or even pleasant, perhaps the most beautiful and wild. Panzhua is a medium sized city and Lijiang is a popular destination for the Chinese, especially during the summer due to its location in the mountains of Yunnan, in southeast China; so I expected there to be a major road between the two cities. There was not. Not two hours after we left, our bus pulled to the side of a narrow, winding, pothole-ridden road and stopped. The only explanation I managed to get out of anyone who could decipher my paleolithic level of Chinese was that the heavy rain had damaged it.
After an hour we continued, winding our way deeper and further up into the mountains.
Soon, the dense forest of emerald trees fell away from the road in steep, almost vertical cliffs, only feet away from the careening, swerving bus. Terraced rice fields, thin waterfalls and even once a rainbow cutting through a deep valley
After an hour we continued, winding our way deeper and further up into the mountains.
Soon, the dense forest of emerald trees fell away from the road in steep, almost vertical cliffs, only feet away from the careening, swerving bus. Terraced rice fields, thin waterfalls and even once a rainbow cutting through a deep valley