Making our way back to China:
As mentioned previously in the last blog post, we caught the K202 train from Guangzhou to Chongqing, which was about a 22 hour trip. We departed from Guangzhou at 3:45 pm & arrived in Chongqing the next day at around 2 pm.
We love catching the over night trains in China, they are just about the best form of travel in China. You can buy tickets for hard seats, soft seats, hard sleepers or soft sleepers. We have caught 2 of these trains on our last trip to China in 2008, & caught the soft sleepers then too. You pay less for a bottom bunk than for a top one, for some reason. We always get one of each. We paid 604 Yuan for the bottom bunk & 631 Yuan for the top bunk.
The soft sleepers are a lot of fun, if you have the time. The trains have dining carts onboard which are fun to experience as well, but it helps if you can speak a little Chinese as they have no English menu’s, but you might be lucky if there’s someone in the dining cart who can speak some English! There are toilets on board in between each different cart, & there are windows on both sides of the trains all the way along.
Each soft sleeper cabin has four bunks, two on the bottom, two above. They provide pillows and nice soft proper blankets for each bunk. Above the top bunks, above the door, there is some room for storing suitcases & luggage. There is also some space under the bottom bunks for extra storage. In between the bottom bunks, next to the window is a little table. The windows have curtains, there’s a bin, little steps to climb up to the top bunk & also a jug with hot water, for tea & noodles.
When we jumped on the train this time, there was no one else in our cabin for about 2 hours & we took a video of the cabin to show other people how cool it is.
The little boy in the cabin next door took a liking to us & was very interested in the iPhone.
This is the best photo we got, looking out the window in the corridor of the train while it was moving along. In this shot the scenery isn’t that great, but sometimes the little farms and mountains you pass are very beautiful.
Related Posts
- Hong Kong to Guangzhou. 14 August 2009.
- Chongqing. 15-22 August 2009.
- Hong Kong. 9-14 August 2009.
- Guilin
- The Journey
