Bucheon to Beijing (part Two)

We had arrived into China, and successfully passed the first hurdle, customs and immigration. I think one look at the mountain of luggage we were manhandling was enough to make any of the officials look the other way and let us in peacefully without any searching. Whilst we were passing through all these formalities inside, the bad weather outside had returned, perhaps it had just followed us across the sea. On our stepping into the arrivals area and it was a free for all with the taxi drivers all eagerly vying for our custom. One of them quickly informed us that his level of English was quite good, that was enough for us and we negotiated that we would have to go in two trips to the railway station. The city of Weihei where we had arrived into looked to be a modern high rise city at least close to the coastline. With many hotels at the higher end of the market for Chinese prices, we had looked at stopping over here, but the prices quoted on the internet were all high by Chinese standards. We had over two months until we would be paid, the cash we had with us had to last us until then, indeed prudent with our spending.

On attempting to put the first of our bags into the taxi I placed one very heavy holdall onto the very wet ground whilst manoeuvring another into the limited space available. A beggar was sitting close by in a very large puddle and waving a very soggy Chinese banknote in my direction, I guessed he wanted me to add to his rather meagre collection, and this was not some bizarre offering. We had been warned to avoid any confrontations with the infamous Chinese beggars. This particular one grabbed hold of my momentarily unattended bag (there was no way he could have lifted it on his own), when I turned back to grab my bag he expected some sort of payment for looking after it. All he got for his protestations was an earful of good old fashioned English, the fact he didn't understand a word didn't matter, he got the meaning. The taxi driver then received some abusive comments from the beggar. Later when we were all reunited at the railway station, the two English guys who were also on their way to Beijing had reiterated to me how refreshing it was to hear the English language so eloquently put so far from home. I couldn't have said it better myself.

On arriving at the railway station the taxi driver went inside to check on the availability of seats on the once daily train to Beijing, leaving in about 10 hours. It was full, no seats available. At first I thought this was some ruse to get some more money from us, but no, he was trying to be helpful. The two English travellers had had a problem with their driver, no trains go from Weihei to Beijing, never have never will. I can take you to the airport he had offered, which airport we never learnt. We had standing tickets for the overnight train and settled down for a long and boring day. We passed the time as best we could, playing cards, that drew quite a crowd, but in their curiosity to watch what was going on, there was no hiding your hand from the other players. One Chinese traveller taught us 1-10 in Chinese, also teaching us the same but in sign language, this turned out to be more useful than the spoken word.

Eventually we were allowed to climb aboard the already full train, we were placed into the end of a carriage and arranged our many bags as best we could with a view to sitting here for up to 16 hours. My wife was being questioned by one of the very official looking train guards. It turned out nothing was wrong, except they had just the number of seats available as we were in the restaurant car, for a price. It turned out the price was only about $6US each, and we would have seats all the way to Beijing. It was not that easy though, we had to offload our bags once again, walk alongside the train to the restaurant car and then find spaces for them and us. But we got fed, a pot noodle.

We could have stayed for a night in Weihei and caught the next nights train, we were assured there were spaces on that one. We had pre-booked our accommodation in Beijing, had we not arrived on the expected day we could have lost our booking and then we would have been at the mercy of outrageous price quotes for accommodating us.

The system for buying tickets for the trains in China is an odd system, they go on sale ten days in advance, and they quickly sell out. You can only buy tickets from the station of departure, no connecting trains. We could not buy our ticket on from Beijing outside of Beijing. Had we not planned to stay in Beijing we may have found ourselves stuck there anyway.

We eventually arrived into Beijing's main railway station amid a very confusing midday. We almost ran a gauntlet of porters trying to quote outrageous prices to carry our bags; we then had all sorts of problems with taxis before we finally arrived at our accommodation. We were more than ready to relax before discovering the city, the journey took us over two full days, interesting but I don't think I would want to repeat it, and we were not even near our final destination yet.