Very Small Array

You wait on line outside Beijing’s main train station. Wrong window. So you wait on a different line. Sorry, no. Try buying your tickets at a hotel, says the man at the ticket counter at the train station.

So Mister Chen took the subway to Beijing West, with written directions to the International Ticket Window on the second floor, and you can’t enter the train station without a ticket so Mister Chen played the foreigner all they way up to the information desk, who directed him downstairs to the ticket booth, where he waited on another line. “Where do you want to go?” the ticket agent asked. “Ulaanbaatar,” said Mister Chen. “Where do you want to go?” How do you say Ulaanbaatar in Chinese? “Mongolia.” “Where?” “The main city in Mongolia?” “Where do you want to go?”

So we went to the CITS agency at the Beijing International Hotel. It was located on the second floor, right where the signs said it would be. We filled out paperwork and show our passports when prompted.

In China, Ulaanbaatar is pronounced Ulaanbatwa.

There’s a large timetable above the main staircase in the Beijing Railway Station. It displays train numbers and destinations in Chinese and English, and then there is a number. Numbers one and two correspond to the two waiting rooms on the second floor.

Our train is a number three.

We ask unhelpful railroad employees. We run up and down and up the stairs.

Between the two waiting rooms is a corridor. A-ha.

Everyone is gathered by the stairs to the track. Everyone is bringing stuff. Giant suitcases and packing boxes resealed with duct tape, large plastic-fiber red blue and white checked bags full of gift food in fancy boxes and IKEA furniture on dollies. When the platform opens it’s us and them and the self-assembled Swedish furniture concepts competing for space as we squeeze down the staircase together to the track. And then for a moment the sky comes into view through the latticework of the station roof. The forest green passenger cars, every doorway manned by a lady standing ramrod straight and smiling in green skirts and coats and thigh-high boots, the Rockettes of the Mongolian plains, the cart attendants. Just for a moment the sky opens above you and those forest green passenger cars stretch forever into the distance belching white smoke, eager to start. And the bounce and jostle of the crowd closes in, returning you to the hard enough business of walking, of watching stairs and elbows.

Oriental rugs cover the floors along the hallway into the compartments. This is a Mongolian train. Our compartment’s walls are wood and the four bunks are swaddled in floral embroidery. The lady cart attendant appears with mugs of strawberry tea. Q: How do you know if you are on a Mongolian train? A: Is the lady car attendant shoveling coal in thigh-high black leather boots with stiletto heels? You are on a Mongolian train.

At 9:15am we pass through the Great Wall of China. In the afternoon dust fills the train like smoke. At 8:40pm the train stops at Erlian, the last stop in China. You can get out, and then the train disappears for two hours. It is freezing cold outside. Inside the station are plastic seats, a bathroom, clocks of the world (non-functional) and a convenience store. The convenience store is packed and people buy in bulk, cardboard flats of water and cookies to take with them to who knows where. Outside loudspeakers on telephone poles play a Mariachi recording of Taps.

It’s a night of interrupted sleep, Chinese immigration and Chinese customs, Mongolian immigration and Mongolian customs. In the morning the lady cart attendant asks 500 tugrik a person for yesterday’s tea.

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MONGOLIAN TRAIN K23
ONE WAY TICKET SECOND CLASS SLEEPER 657RMB (APPROX $82.13)
DEPARTS BEIJING WEDNESDAY AND SATURDAY 7:40AM
ARRIVES ULAANBAATAR NEXT DAY 1:15PM
SUGGESTED ACTIVITY: Get tugrik ahead of time. The lady cart attendant exchange rate isn’t good.

I’ve heard it’s more expensive but easier to purchase train tickets from third party agencies. Which is what we tried to do, but we could never find the hotel that supposedly sold the train tickets, and the ticket office is just to the right of the train station past the public square filled with old men sitting on the rice sacks that hold their belongings. So we went to the ticket office. We got in line for the English ticket window, which was not so much a line, and the lady behind the counter did not speak English. We asked for tickets aboard a night train to Beijing. Hard sleeper? No. We got what they gave us.

The most expensive train from Shanghai to Beijing costs sixty United States dollars. This ticket buys passage to the soft seat waiting room, reached through the specially marked door at the front of the Shanghai train station, and there is a piano in it. In front of a staircase is a board of upcoming trains followed by numbers. These numbers do not correspond to the track number, like you might sit in the soft chairs of the waiting room for a half an hour thinking they do. This number is the floor that your actual waiting room is on. Okay. So we hustle up to the second floor waiting room where there aren’t any seats left, but there is a store selling cookies and beverages for inflated prices that are still cheaper than anything you could have imagined before arriving in China. That’s where we are when they announce the train, buying crackers with sugary lemon filling that are delicious, so I don’t know if there was an announcement but the mass of people in the waiting room converge on a single point, so we joined them there.

Sixty United States dollars buys you a bed in a four person cabin. The cabin also has a a vase with a fake flower in it, and a menu, and a magazine in Chinese, four bunks with sheets and pillows and an informational brochure. The Z trains are the fastest trains China has. It says that in the brochure. Five Z trains leave Shanghai between 6:45pm and 7:30pm. Three of these serve dinner, including ours. It is a sort of sausage half-calzone with pickled carrots, and it comes with a few pieces of plastic-wrapped bread in a paper bag. The vegans in the bunk across, with some help from Mister Chen, eventually manage to communicate something to the lady cart attendant. She eventually reappears with rice and vegetables from the restaurant car. The lady cart attendant does insists on repatriating their little bags of bread.

In the dining car you can order a 15RMB Tsingtsao and listen to the people who have ordered multiple bottles of wine with their dinner and are talking about senior management. On the fanciest means of conveyance between Shanghai and Beijing you do not just get the ambiance of a fake flower in a vase. You also get to travel with the fanciest people going from Shanghai and Beijing. Hell. You are the fanciest people going from Shanghai to Beijing.

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CHINESE RAILWAYS’ Z6
ONE WAY TICKET SOFT SLEEPER 499RMB (ABOUT$63USD) (BOTTOM BUNK)
478RMB (ABOUT $61USD) (TOP BUNK)
DEPARTS SHANGHAI DAILY 7:14PM
ARRIVES BEIJING, CHINA NEXT DAY 7:12AM
SUGGESTED ACTIVITY: Shimmy down to the restaurant car while you can still afford it.
chinahighlights.com/china-trains/index.htm

The Shanghai Ferry Company runs ferries to Shanghai every Friday at noon. They ask that you arrive by 10:30am. Reservations can be made in advance, but tickets can only be bought in cash at the ferry terminal.

Leave plenty of time the morning your ferry departs. You’ll need to pack your bags and check out of your hotel. Hit a post office to get cash for your ticket – only post office ATMs in Japan reliably accept foreign ATM cards. And buy some food or snacks for the trip. Take the subway to the Cosmosquare station and make a sharp left along the water, then just follow the road for about fifteen minutes to the International Ferry Terminal. Waking up by 7:30am should give you plenty of time. We set our alarms for 7:30am. At 10:00am the radio alarm clock has been buzzing static for two and a half hours and the digital watch has been silent for exactly as long. In Japan you can buy warm sake from vending machines.

We are out of the hotel by 10:20. We are at Cosmosquare a half an hour later. We reach the International Ferry Terminal a little after 11:00.

We do not have any money.

The lady at the desk takes our passports. She has our tickets. We cannot pay for them. Credit card? The reservation form said quite clearly: Japanese yen only. Of course. Is there a Post Office? Yes. It’s a half an hour walk away.

The man behind the counter starts walking. With a blind trust forged in panic we follow him. We go to the parking lot. Can we take a taxi? The man leads us past the taxis. He leads us to a clean white mini-van and gets in the drivers seat. His car. So we get in. It’s a white-knuckled five minute drive to the post office, a hurried dash into an office building and a wasted thirty seconds trying all the doors until we find one that opens. Once we are inside the post office the man runs back out to the parking lot. I take out more yen than we will need with too-hard jabs at the ATM buttons and we run out to the parking lot where the man has pulled his car around, and before we can pull shut the heavy van doors we are racing back to the ferry terminal. Five minutes later we are paying for our tickets. Ten minutes later we are running through immigration with our passports out. Fifteen minutes later we are on the boat.

The world is kind to idiots.

Rooms have a bunk bed on either side of the doorway as you enter, and a television in the far corner of the room. The movie schedule is posted in the lobby. There is a low table by a window that looks out at the front of the ship. The lobby has a machine for hot water and tea, and one for cold water. The cups here are free. After the ship departs a ping-pong table is placed in the lobby. After the first day the ping-pong table is folded up ad lashed to the side of a hallway. The second floor lounge is the one where all the foreigners sit and talk about travel plans, and the typhoon we are heading into, which the ship’s crew makes announcements about in Japanese, but does not acknowledge in English.

The cafeteria serves breakfast. It’s not very good, but it is complementary. Next door is a restaurant where at night you can sit at the bar and sing Karaoke. Or you can just listen to Karaoke. It’s quite audible from the second floor lounge.

Outside of Shanghai a fleet of ghost ships sits rusting to our right, and to our left they are building more. At disembarkation we get on a little bus to customs and immigration, which is incredibly easy, and then you are on the street in no one quite knows where. Welcome to China. Taxis are affordable. Don’t get robbed.

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OSAKA SUBWAY
ONE WAY TICKET 12-19km ¥230 (ABOUT $1.96USD)
SUGGESTED ACTIVITY: If there is anyone with you you can say to them Don’t panic, don’t panic. If you are alone you can mutter it under your breath.
kotsu.city.osaka.jp/english/index.html

SHANGHAI FERRY COMPANY’S SU ZHOU HAO
ONE WAY TICKET SEMI-STANDARD CLASS ¥22000 (ABOUT $186USD)
DEPARTS OSAKA, JAPAN WEEKLY FRIDAY AT NOON
ARRIVES SHANGHAI, CHINA SUNDAY NOON OR 3:00PM
SUGGESTED ACTIVITY: Tallboys of Premium Kirin and Asahi are only ¥200 from the duty-free vending machines.
shanghai-ferry.co.jp

There are three vending machines at the Izuro Kosoku Bus Center, one block of storage lockers and four rows of seats. There is one night bus from Kagoshima to Osaka and it leaves the station every day at 7:30pm. Buying a ticket the day of travel poses no problem. The storage lockers take ¥400 in ¥100 coins.

There are three columns of seats running the length of the bus, two at the windows and one in the center with an aisle on either side. Thick curtains cover the windows. The bathroom is sunk half a stairwell below the level of the seats in the middle of the bus and smells like neither urine nor cigarettes. Across from the stairwell is a machine that dispenses hot water, and across from that is a cooler filled with complimentary boxes of bitter green tea. Each seat has a cup holder and a pair of slippers. Each seat reclines all the way back into the lap of the person sitting behind you.

There are two men in uniform at the front of the bus. One of them is driving. The other faces the passengers and speaks as we begin our trip. He speaks for a half an hour. Some time after 10:00pm the bus stops in a large parking lot half-filled with big trucks. In the middle of the parking lot is a gas station and a convenience store. Vending machines line the hallway between the convenience store and the bathrooms. We are there for twenty minutes. Then the men in the matching uniforms change places, and the talkative man starts to drive. The thick curtains stay closed. From the window there is nothing on the highway but headlights.

Our second stop in the morning is near Osaka Station. You will need to hand a man in a uniform your luggage ticket to get your luggage back. You will need to hand a man in a uniform your bus ticket. You will need to follow someone who knows where they are going to find Osaka Station.

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NIGHT BUS TO OSAKA
ONE WAY TICKET ¥13000 (ABOUT $112USD)
DEPARTS KAGOSHIMA, JAPAN DAILY 7:30PM
ARRIVES OSAKA, JAPAN NEXT DAY 10:00AM
SUGGESTED ACTIVITY: Something that is quiet and requires no light, like listening to music with headphones or reading Braille.

Every other day the A-line ferries run between Naha and Kagoshima, stopping at several of the Amami Islands along the way. Every other other day it is the Marix ferries that do the running. Both companies have their ticketing offices at the Naha-Ko Ferry Terminal Building. We leave Naha on an even-numbered day, so it’s the A-Line ferry we buy tickets for. It leaves at 7am. The ferry building opens at 6am. The ferry is a containerized cargo ship that carries passengers on its top three floors. At half past six we line up on the tarmac with our tickets and climb the rickety sea-stairs and enter the ship, where music is piped in and prints line the walls and an orange escalator invites us to the world of the Passenger Decks. We are taken aside and led to a desk where a woman stamps our tickets, and then we are pointed to our room.

The room we sleep in holds 205 other people. It looks like a human baggage carousel, a large expanse of blue carpet in a U-shape traveling from the port to starboard entrance of foot traffic with squares cut out to leave your shoes in. The carpet is half-covered in rows of folded light blue mattresses, beige blankets with the A-line logo in red and a small square pillow the size of a tissue box. If all the mattresses were unfolded they would cover the carpet completely. The older people have put the beige blankets on their heads and gone to sleep. Families unfold their consecutive mattresses and organize picnics. We put our bags down against the wall at our own 4×6 footprint. Across the room there is a sense of being evacuated from a very genteel tragedy.

The lobby is arranged in rings. At the center two staircases lead to the next floor. Around those staircases is a circular planter filled with slight greenery and the men who sit here, smoking, and around them is ring of six ashtrays. There is a cafeteria, a bar and a restaurant, but only the cafeteria is open. The curry rice is about five dollars and not bad. The battered consignment shop sells sandwiches.

You can purchase a special ticket that allows you to travel for as long as one week, getting off and on the ferry where you wish. We get off at Tokunashima because Lonely Planet says nothing about it except that there are very many old people there, and beaches. We get off the ship at 4:30pm the day we board and we get back on the ship at 5:00 four days later. The next morning we reach Kagoshima.

Half of everyone gets their bags and stands around in the lobby much earlier than they need to. Everyone else sees them, gets nervous, and drags their bags to the lobby. Outside the terminal the taxis line up. After some standard issue miscommunication and pantomime, the lady at the terminal counter gives us a photocopied map. She circles our destination.

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ARIMURA SANGYO (A-LINE) FERRY
ONE WAY WITH STOPOVERS, CHEAPEST TICKET ¥14200 (ABOUT $122US)
DEPARTS NAHA, JAPAN EVERY OTHER DAY 7:00AM
ARRIVES KAGOSHIMA, JAPAN NEXT DAY 8:30AM
SUGGESTED ACTIVITY: Watching the clouds and dreaming of vending machines.
arimuraline.co.jp