Overnight trains

   Trains are great. In China. Overnight trains can also be great. In China. We have taken overnight trains in both India and China and in China the sleeper class was clean albeit slightly smoky. The sheets were only slightly spotted and food carts with fresh veggies and $0.50 packs of playing cards. The sounds of passengers spitting on the train floor marked the time as 18 hours flew by from Xian to Beijing. On the way I learned the marvelous game of Chinese chess (a game that strangers would come up and suggest moves by moving our pieces for us)...it is just like chess except there are canons, elephants, and officers involved. Outside each cabin there was a spigot for hot water and sometimes a tv for hours of unbroken Chinese language shows!



India however was a different story. We arrived at the dilapidated old station from when the British were there. From that point on until the train arrived at 2 am (4 hours late, even though we were only the train's second stop after 2 hours of travel) we avoided eye contact with the sketchy men who kept circling us, we dodged rats (we actually had to stomp to get them to move), and we entertained ourselves by watching the rats fight. We did make it unscathed on to the train, which is more than I can say for some of the dozens of people sleeping on the ground in the station who we watched be bitten by the rats. Ick.



A minor fight inside the train station with someone we thought was stealing our pillows (he wasn't, he was actually the attendant replacing them with slightly less dirty pillows) was all that we experienced before falling asleep. Boy were we happy to be off of that train in the morning...

The moral of the story: China trains good and, unless you are the pied piper, India trains bad.