Ping Yao, China

We thought that it would be a good idea to see something other than Beijing while we were on our short 2 week trip in China, so we broke out of Beijing and headed for a city just over 700km to the West, the city of Ping Yao. We booked ourselves on an over night train from the Beijing West Railway station.

The train system in China seemed to operate quite differently than it does in India. India's train stations seem like a swirling mass of disorganized people all hanging out on the platform, in the big cities things can be quite chaotic. Things in China were a lot more organized in some ways. One of the ridiculous things about Chinas rail system though is that you can only get a train ticket from the city you are in. This meant that we could get a ticket to Ping Yao, but not back, slightly worrisome since we were doing this journey right at the end of our trip to China, with only 3 days to spare. The train station itself is pretty different, when you arrive, you enter the station proper through a security system of guards and x-rays. Once inside you go to your designated waiting area away from the train platforms and then when you are within a few minutes of the train departure you go through a designated gate (much like you do when boarding an airplane) and finally onto the train platform. The tickets are checked before you can enter the platform and then again before you can get on your designated coach.

We booked what they call a hard sleeper (as opposed to a soft sleeper), which is a bit of a misleading term. They are still padded sleepers, but just not as plush as the soft sleeper, but also half the price. Each berth has six beds, we had the ones on top, close to the ceiling and the A/C vent. It is really fun though because you feel like a kid up there on top of a really tall bunk bed. The people we met on the trains were really nice, very friendly and we were certainly a bit of a novelty for the other Chinese travelers in our coach. Much like in India, we talk to a person who speaks English (in this case a 17 year old girl returning from 2 days of piano instruction in Beijing), she then relays the information to the other people in our berth and then the information starts to work its way through the coach. This is quite funny because when you walk to the toilets at the end of the coach you might exchange a smile with someone who then turns to the person next to them and explains what we had told the girl earlier, we could pick this up because we would here the chinese word for Canadian, then the person next to them would nod and look up at us and smile, or giggle, very cute. Anyhow, we had a great sleep on the train, i dreamt about earthquakes and bombs dropping which i realized after i woke up was likely due to the constant movement on the train working its way into my dreams and me trying to explain this in dreamland, kinda funny.

Most of our journey was at night but there was a decent chunk in daylight, the whole journey was about 13 hours. Outside Beijing did confirm some of our suspicions, that perhaps Beijing was not an accurate picture of China. The towns we passed through looked pretty run down, many with poorly constructed apartment blocks which looked 50 years old (but in actual fact were likely a lot newer). Towns usually had several factories and smoke stacks, pumping out black smoke and some had huge flames coming our of them (likely refineries). Most of the roads were not nearly as nice as what we had seen in Beijing, full of potholes and poorly maintained, but there were a couple of exceptions, which seemed out of place. In one small city that was very rough and run down looking, the ground mostly just dry dirt, there was a beautiful flower and tree lined boulevard running right through the middle, in complete contrast to what was around it, quite strange.

Ping Yao was very interesting. It is a walled city that is very old. The city walls were originally constructed between 800 and 600 BC. We stayed at a guest house that was over 250 years old. The buildings are mostly hundreds of years old (rather than thousands of years) and the city has not been restored. This is a significant point because the Chinese have a peculiar idea about restoration, the simply take away the old stuff and rebuild it in the same design using all new materials, so things don't actually look old at all, because they're not. In Ping Yao however, the city has not had any money to do any restoration, although that is likely to change since tourists are now traveling there. Before the year 2000 the city was virtually unheard of, but now it's popularity is growing and with good reason, it really is a fascinating, totally in tact old working city.

We spent a good deal of time just wandering around checking things out. We rented bicycles again which made moving around much more fun. On the end of our 2nd day we managed to pull together another photo shoot which went very well. We used a beautiful 21 year old girl from the city of Xian, she was a great actor/model and we were able to create some exciting images. After our flirting but great visit with Ping Yao we did manage to make it back to Beijing but it wasn't easy.

Back when we first arrived in Ping Yao we went to the train station to book our return train, this was important since we had a flight to catch. There were no tickets available. We couldn't believe it, this system of only being able to book tickets from the place you are in is so stupid. There were no tickets available on the one train per day to Beijing, there is no bus service and no flight service, we began to get very concerned. At the train station they did offer us tickets to get on the train but we would have to stand up for the 13 hour journey through the night, ahhhhh. We rode our bikes bake to the guest house and explained the situation to see what could be done. In the end we payed someone off to sort things out for us, the Chinese equivalent of Indian Baksheesh I suppose. Basically someone drove to a town 1/2 and hour down the line and bought us tickets from that station instead. Since that stop was before ours in Ping Yao we still just got on the train where we wanted. Can you believe this booking system? I mean there were tickets available on the train but they were allocated to the previous station, how annoying. But we did get on, had to pay for it mind-you, had a super sleep and woke up the next day back in Beijing.

During our last day in Beijing we took it pretty easy, spent time socializing around the hostel and then went out for a spell of clothes shopping at the market. Very early the next morning we caught another great Singapore Airlines flight to Singapore and then Up to Bangkok.