"China and lessons on emigration:"
I paid a nasty little tout at the La La Cafe across from Guilin station 36 yuan (the equivalent of $12.50) for a train ticket to Beijing.
Clutching my cardboard ticket, my passport to the unknown, I headed in midafternoon to the Osmanthus Hotel to rest in its dormitory for Westerners until departure. Around sunset, a hint of what lay in store came from four pale blond Danes. They entered the dormitory room greatly amused by their entertainment for the evening: a visit to the train station.
"We just saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show," said the tall one with a handsome drooping mustache and thinning hair.
I looked up from my tattered guidebook and shook my head, puzzled as to what he meant.
He referred to the spectacle of the 21:20 Shanghai-to-Kunming train pulling in, already packed to the gills.
The Danes had confirmed seats the following night. They had gone to watch a preview of the spectacle of Western backpackers, Japanese students on spring break and Chinese with unreserved tickets trying to squeeze on to the bursting train.
"First they let the tourists out of the waiting room," the Dane continued. "They ran up the platform, but hard-seat [third class] was already packed, with people on top of each other. One German guy got on somehow and then got off again--he couldn't stand the thought of staying on for 40 hours like that. He had held his hands in front of his balls to keep them from being crushed.
"Then they let the Chinese board. They raced out of the waiting room--there must have been several hundred of them--and they started shoving to get on.
"Some of them stopped to help two girls from Alaska get on. They lifted them over their heads and passed them in through the window, packs and all."
The whole thing sounded as fantastic as if they had reported finding caves with dragons in the limestone peaks above the Li River. But I was to learn it was a rather straightforward assessment of Chinese train travel.
"I wonder if it will be that bad, heading to Beijing," I said. "If so, you may see me back here later tonight."
My simple camp bed seemed unusually luxurious as I lay back for an hour's nap before the ordeal ahead. I had only a third-class ticket, or hard-seat ticket in Chinese parlance, for the 32-hour run to the capital.
At 11 p.m., I walked to Guilin station with a woman I'll call Sadie, a short, brown-haired, 25-year-old waitress from Banff in the Canadian Rockies. She also had a hard-seat ticket on the 1:05. Unknown to me at the time, a legend taking shape on the 1985 China backpacker circuit had latched onto me.
Sadie lugged a rucksack full of canned meat, peanut butter and Western cutlery up the road to the station. Even among the poorer backpackers, few would buy a 40-cent can of meat simply because it cost less than a $3 meal in a local eatery. For those few subscribers to the eat-badly-and-save-money school of thought, Sadie qualified as the Descartes.
I may be one cheap Cajun--I nearly got hit by a car while picking up a penny in downtown Baltimore one day. But while French Canadians tend to be cheap, we still ultimately remain French enough to be perpetually fascinated with various cuisines. Thus Sadie's line of reasoning struck me as mad. Local meals would be inexpensive and might also be good. You would never know unless you tried them.
The huge waiting room at Guilin South glowed brightly, packed despite the hour. That was China for you: no nightlife except for the 24-hour theater of train travel. I took out my two phrasebooks and cardboard ticket, to seek help so that we would end up in the correct line.
We made our way self-consciously to two Red Army officers with red insignia on their green overcoats, surrounded by a sea of string-tied parcels. They rearranged themselves and their belongings to make room for us before we could even ask, "Beijing?" They nodded and gestured to the bench beside them.
Time passed slowly. The 23:30 to Shanghai skimmed off several hundred in the crowd. We moved around the benches, in the shape of a giant letter C, and found ourselves near the front of the queue.
The officers craned their necks to read our luggage tags. I pointed to the "USA" in my address and then showed them the Chinese characters for United States in my Berlitz. They nodded and smiled.
Sadie leaned over to them and said, "I'm from Canada?" with her rising inflection that of a Valley Girl, North of the Border division. "Show them Canada in the book," she ordered flatly. I gave her a look.
She opened a flap on her battered gray rucksack with its Maple Leaf patch and pulled out some tissues. She had been spluttering and blowing noisily all evening. She coughed right into my face, spittle peppering me.
"Sadie, don't cough on me again," I raged, thinking how much I had swum and worked out to be reasonably health in China. And now I would probably get sick, not from a Chinese crowd but a Canadian waitress.
"Everyone is sick here, you're gonna get it," she shot back without missing a beat.
I could no longer deny that Sadie struck me as lazy, clueless, an idiot and a pest. She would vastly outshine me, however, in stamina and equanimity on this trip.