Shanghai to Lhasa Train Ride

August 9-10

We picked up luggage and made our way over to the Shanghai Railway Station. With questionable instructions from our Tibet tour guide, we weren’t completely convinced that there would really be tickets waiting for us at the station. Plus we were once again in a situation where everything was written in Chinese, so we were on the struggle bus. Travel days that include uncertainty make me pretty anxious and it doesn’t add any value to the process. But anxious I am, none the less. We finally found out where the ticket station was and took the surprisingly long hike over there. With no understanding of what was going on, we just picked a line and hoped for the best.

We sat in line for about 20 or 30 minutes before it was our turn. It seemed like every person that was going up to the ticket window was having problems or was being turned away. Thank goodness we gave ourselves three hours to make this happen. When it was finally our turn, we gave the woman behind the glass everything that could possibly be helpful: passports, ticket reference number, Tibet permit, China visas. She handed over tickets to us in under two minutes. It was surprisingly easy and it was all done without any ability to verbally communicate.

Next we had to go through security as you would at an airport and then off to seating area 2 to wait the next two hours for our train. Now, Michael and I are fairly confident travelers, but nothing unnerves me like officials yelling things in a foreign language and people acting on those commands. What are they saying?! Should we be moving?! Are we in the wrong place?! This was actually a similar problem we had at the Vietnam embassy in Tokyo.

So much travel anxiety! So I did the same thing in Shanghai as I did in Tokyo. I looked like a moron and walked up to the official and shoved my ticket in his face to see if he was talking about us. No words. Just a ticket shoved in random person’s face. Not my finest moment, but he shook his head, pointed at the waiting area we were already sitting in and said a bunch of stuff in Mandarin. Got the job done and gave us a little calm before the storm of a few hundred Chinese racing and pushing to get onto the train.

We usually just hang back in these situations until the boarding panic is over, but in this situation I wanted to get into our cabin quickly to make sure that whoever we were sharing space with didn’t touch our area. It felt important to claim our space early on and Michael was completely in agreement.

We boarded the train a bit before 8pm. It is a 47 hour train ride, and Michael and I reserved soft berths for the trip. Soft berths are cabins with four beds that have mattresses, pillows and sheets, with a tiny table. The other options were hard berths (rows of cubbies you can sleep in with no privacy and no sheets/mattress) or seats similar to an airplane. This was not a hard choice.

We ended up getting super super lucky. We didn’t have any roommates… for the entire trip! Throughout the two days, people got on and off the train, but our room was left alone! It was great. Especially since we were in a world with no English, it was really nice for us to have a place to retreat and hideout a bit. We later found out that the train was totally booked. A couple from the Netherlands that were in our Tibet tour group had to sleep on the hard berths because there were no soft available when they booked their tickets. So whoever was suppose to be in our cabin must have just missed the train or something. Apparently the hard berths were completely miserable, with people crammed into small spaces, sleeping and eating and sharing air for two straight days. So we were super lucky.

We slept a lot, played cards, read a couple of books, and started acclimating to the altitude. And we tried the food in the food car, but mostly we ate the provisions we found the day before in Shanghai: cool ranch doritos, peanuts, frito scoops, granola bars and two huge jugs of water. Yes, it was a bit like college.

Eh… it tasted ok. A bit better than airplane food, but not good enough to warrant a second hot meal in the 47 hours.

We did have some beautiful views and we saw yaks for the first time!

Don’t worry. I have some better yak pictures coming in the next post. It is an animal that I didn’t know I loved until I got to Tibet. I love them.

We liked the romantic idea behind a cross country train trip, but there wasn’t a ton to see and with no shower facilities, it was a bit less romantic than expected. And the bathroom situation was beyond gross.

But now we made it to Tibet! We have a set tour for the next six days before heading across the border to Nepal.