My Hero

Our black market train tickets to Kunming were legit. With a minimum of hassle, and the usual mad Chinese stampede through the gate, we found our train car.

At first glance hard-sleeper looked dismal - cubby holes of six beds each (stacked three high on either side). There were no doors to the cabins. Loud speakers pumped high-pitched Chinese songs at us. The luggage racks were overflowing by time we boarded; and there were people everywhere. I stuffed our backpacks under one of the bunks and hoped that when I pulled them back out I would still recognize them.

The car attendant came by with a dirty mop to swish under everyone's feet and that constituted the entire level of hygiene that our train car possessed. The bathrooms were filthy and John's initial comment seemed to fit the bill. "Hard-sleeper is like cattle car grade."

But John's comment was made before he attempted to hike to the front of the train, to the hard-seat car, to find the upgrade conductor. He was gone over twenty minutes. When we returned, he plopped down on the bunk next to me and began laughing wildly.

"Did you find the conductor?" I asked hopefully. Maybe he was laughing with glee.

"Are you kidding?" John sputtered between hiccups for air. "I never even made it past car eight. There are people everywhere. They're sitting in the sink."

I started to laugh too. "How bad was it?"

"They're sitting in that area between the train cars. Loads of people. They've spilled over from soft-seat. There are people lying on top of other people. The music is deafening, the smoke is so thick you can cut it. I saw a guy hawking spit on the floor of the dining car and some kid was peeing on the seat. It reeks up there. The bathrooms - Oh God, forget the bathrooms." John finally slowed down. "Hard-sleeper looks pretty darn nice," he said and burst into another fit of laughter.

So hard-sleeper it was. We slept with our clothes on (everyone did) and avoided the bathroom at the far end of the car. With earplugs at night, the buzz-saw in the bed across from me was reduced to the hum of annoying gnat. It was tolerable.

Still we preferred first class (soft-sleeper) and in the morning it was my turn to brave the crushing mob to get to car number seven and that elusive upgrade conductor.

During the night most people had piled on top of each other onto seats making the aisles just passable. I spotted an American couple and stopped to talk with them. "How ya holding out?" I asked. They nodded. "Ok I guess." They confirmed what I already knew, that hard-seat was bad. "You're lucky you got hard-sleeper," they said. Then they gave me a weak laugh. "At least we have a story to tell when we get home."

They'd each gotten one hour of sleep, they said in the last sixteen hours; and kept switching places to share the one full space on the bench where an entire rear end could fit.

I felt slightly guilty asking for an upgrade after that. But I asked anyway. I was turned away. The conductor wrote "2:45" on a piece of paper. I had to come back later. John made the third trip to hard seat. When he returned he was laughing again. "Now What?" I asked. John pulled two soft-sleeper chits from his pocket. "We got 'em!" he said.

"John, you're my hero!!"

The first class car attendant didn't offer us clean sheets or pillowcases. We had to made due with the ones that were already on the beds - used by who-knows-who before us. The cabin was dirty, but in comparison to hard-sleeper, it was luxury. We could shut the door, turn down the volume of the annoying music, and we only had to share it with two others (and they didn't spit).

The scenery from our window made up for the lack of cleanliness - in that our eyes were diverted from it. It was the China I had come to see. There were steep canyon walls rising from rolling water. There were waterfalls, fields of corn, lotus leaves and terraced rice paddies, and Chinamen in wide straw hats working them. It was all set in a deep green with a rainy sky hanging above. The villages had wooden houses with straw roofs or mud houses topped in wooden beams. People rode bikes down muddy roads or walked between rows of rice. At night, tiny yellow lights glowed from the houses and a mist settled over the hills leaving only the peaks to poke through. It gave the land a sureal-real look; like a sea of floating islands.

This was the Yunnan Provence. The air was cool, it was breathable, and "John, look up. I can see the sky!"

The end of the train line was Kunming. As cities go in China, this one is nice - clean, lively and still retaining some of it's former architecture (although the wrecking ball of 'progress' looms over what remains). The main shopping streets (modernized now) are lined with hanging red lanterns. There is a lively flower and bird market. And, there is even a WalMart (as only China could do it - humongous and mobbed).

We checked into a hotel near the train station (the best hotel so far) and John set off to prove his heroism once again. "You relax," he told me. "I'm going to the train station to get us tickets to Dali."

I was stunned. He'd done it. "A policeman ushered me right to the front of the line," he told me. "Piece of cake!"

John was two for two and that called for a celebration. He passed up the opportunity to buy me a dozen roses (what would I do with them anyway) and instead went for something we really needed: a dinner of Italian brick-oven pizza and spinach ravioli. Two mugs of frothy beer were raised. "To cool air and sky!" I said. "To seeing stars!"