notes and images

Tag: train

Hard Seat to Panda Town

July 2006, Beijing: The legendary hard seat on Chinese trains.

We’d waited and waited and tried and tried but just couldn’t get sleeper tickets. How bad could the “hard seat” be? I mean, it has a cushion, right? The trip’s only 23 hours – no worse than flying from Sydney to London. As is so often the case, here was another great example of “famous last words”.

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Riding the rails from Oruro to Uyuni

The darkness fell over our bus and the high Bolivian plateau south of La Paz. We’d ground to a halt an hour ago, along with every other truck and bus for two kilometres ahead and four behind, their motionless headlights tracing a smooth arc through the blackness. Suddenly everyone leaped to the left side of the bus, as blinking red lights told us we were about to see what had held us up.

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