Further adventures in HELL

I'm supposed to be in Dalian today - but I'm not.

My anguished post about the unreliability of air travel in China 10 days ago proved to be all too prescient.

A string of heavy rainstorms over the past few weeks has been causing massive disruption to China's internal air travel. We had two monster thunderstorms over Beijing on Monday night and Tuesday night, and the knock-on effects of diversions and airport closures occasioned by that are still leading to flight cancellations days later, when the weather's cleared up again.

So, my Wednesday morning began early with a phone call from Ctrip giving me the unsurprising 'news' that my flight to Dalian was cancelled (and, given the domino-effect snafu paralysing the airways, I was told that it was extremely likely that my return flight from Dalian on Sunday would also be cancelled). I received this information particularly grumpily, because the electricity to my building had also been knocked out by the storm at around midnight, and so I had been without air-conditioning all night; and, of course, after a heavy rain, the humidity goes through the roof -  I was painfully dehydrated, and had hardly slept a wink. I managed to get the air-con back on and finally started to doze off around 6am. Thus, to be wakened a couple of hours later by a phone call telling me that my holiday plans were in the toilet was..... unwelcome.

There are only three or four flights a day to Dalian. And, apparently, half of them were cancelled for the rest of the week. Which meant that the remaining ones were hopelessly overbooked. I'm not sure that I really believe my flight was 'cancelled'; I suspect I was just bumped off it, because demand was so high, and I was a low-priority customer. I was offered the opportunity to rebook on a flight that left after midnight (was supposed to leave - things at Beijing airport have become so chaotic these last few days that I wouldn't have wanted to take a chance on it) and would get into Dalian in the middle of the night. No good at all for rendezvousing with the friends who had offered to put me up. I decided to decline that option.

Were there any alternatives open to me? Well, I couldn't readily investigate, since my Internet service had also been knocked out by the storm. And my landlord was insisting that - although this pretty obviously seemed like a central network problem with the server or whatever, not a problem at my end - everyone's connector box had to be re-set manually. Yep, allegedly all of the 200 or so of the neighbours in my xiaoqu who use this service would have to wait for a visit from the repairman - the sole repairman - before their Internet connection could be restored. It might take days. After some vigorous lobbying, I managed to get the Internet company to agree to prioritise me: they promised they would come that same day. But they couldn't say exactly when. Then they gave me a time. Then they changed it. Then they changed it again. So, basically, I had to stay at home all day in order to get my Internet "fixed". And when the guy finally showed up, he said,"Oh, I don't think I need to do anything here. You're probably reconnected by now." As I had supposed all along.  Ggrrrr.

So, anyway, I wasn't able to investigate the train options until the next day. I was amazed to find that The Man In Seat 61, ordinarily the oracle on all things chemindeferrous, is reporting that Beijing West station has recently introduced a spiffing new English-language ticket office... which can sell tickets for any journey in China. This seemed too good to be true. China's railway network still flounders with a hopelessly uncoordinated ticketing system and no worthwhile IT infrastructure: only rarely, if you're lucky, will you be able to buy a 'return ticket' (you can usually only buy single-journey tickets from the origin station; so, you have to arrive at your destination before you can try to buy a ticket from there back to home); you can never buy a ticket for a journey between two points other than where you are. Until now?? I was deeply sceptical; but this was too wonderful a prospect not to be checked out.

Unfortunately, Beijing West station is: a) HUGE; b) almost completely devoid of worthwhile signage (in English, Chinese, or symbol); c) as crowded as New York in Soylent Green; and d) a long way from anywhere (it's supposed to be getting connected to the subway network, and to the main Beijing railway station, one day; but that day is still far off; at the moment, it's a mile-and-half from the nearest subway stop - and yesterday was a day of sweltering humidity and choking pollution). After an hour or more of exploring this nightmarish station, I concluded that The Magic Ticket Booth was nought but a beautiful myth. In fact, they didn't seem to have even one English-language serving point in either of the two enormous - but unconnected, and unsignposted - ticket halls that I managed to find (there may well be others; the place is a labyrinth).

I decided to try my luck at the main Beijing railway station on the other side of town (which was probably where I'd be departing from anyway). And, in the past, they used to have a 'foreigners only' ticket office - unsignposted, of course; discreetly hidden away in one of the 'Soft Sleeper Waiting Rooms' off the south-east corner of the main departure hall. They don't any more.

I don't know if this is a sign of the country's increasing unconcern - if not outright bolshieness - towards foreigners, but efforts to provide foreigner-friendly assistance seem to have declined rapidly in the last few years. Many stations around the country used to have such a - small, hidden - 'foreigner' ticket booth (I can, in a pinch, manage to buy a train ticket in Chinese; but the queues at the Chinese service windows are LONG and often undisciplined); but I'm betting they've all now been phased out. It didn't really matter that much for those of us who live here, because over the past 5 or 6 years there's been a proliferation of small agencies which can sell you train tickets in your neighbourhood. But a month or two ago, that option was snatched away from us. New 'security' regulations have been brought in which require you to show ID when purchasing a train ticket; for foreigners, that means a passport; and these local agencies are not empowered to process passport information (apparently, this is in Beijing only; everywhere else in China is implementing the same regulations, but no-one else seems to have a problem with continuing to allow the local ticket booths to sell train tickets to foreigners). So, we now have to go the train stations in person.... where we find that there is no English-language ticket service any more.

Well, that's not quite true. In the main ticket hall at Beijing Station, one of the 50 ticket windows had been designated as a 'foreigner service point'. There was no sign to this effect above the window itself (a discreet notice - in English only - advised of this arrangement as you entered the hall), so, most of the people waiting in line were Chinese. I can't blame them. The ticket hall was close to capacity, a seething mass of people (though not as bad as one of the ones at Beijing West, where the lines were snaking out of the door). Perhaps there were some notices in Chinese discouraging locals from attempting to use this window, because the queue was significantly shorter than any of the others - only about 25 or 30 people (most of them in pairs or threes). I was morosely speculating that it might take me a couple of hours to get served. I determined to wait until 3pm (about 50 minutes), and then give up on the exercise.

Both of the stations I visited yesterday were packed out. Well, this is a peak holiday season, I suppose. And the meltdown of the domestic air traffic system in the last week or two has undoubtedly added to the demand. The recent high-speed rail crash has probably had an effect, too: I hear that the high-speed services have been radically cut back (probably less as a safety precaution, and more because of a failure of public confidence: nobody wants to use them any more - whether or not the number of services has been reduced, I would imagine that a lot of people have been switching to the regular rail network)

So, Chinese railway stations, always reminiscent of one of those 17th Century depictions of hell, are even more than usually overcrowded at the moment.  My queue, however, I was pleasantly surprised to find, was moving quite quickly. I got to the front in only about 40 minutes - comfortably ahead of my self-imposed deadline. And the girl at the window did speak a little bit of English - not much, but some.

Alas.... well, as I summed up the situation to my friends in Dalian, and to various interested parties in Beijing who had been giving me encouragement during this long ordeal...

"Today: midnight slow train only, standing room only. Coming back Sunday: midnight slow train only, hard seat only. Gentlemen, we just lost the Moon."

No, no Dalian for me. And I'm beginning to suffer anxiety attacks about next week's expedition to Yunnan going the same way...  Oiveh!

[This is the only 'live' post you'll get from me for a while. I spent a good chunk of Sunday and Monday 'pre-cooking' 20 or so posts to keep you entertained on the blogs over the next two or three weeks. I may not actually be able to leave Beijing on my planned holidays. If the weather remains this debilitatingly humid, I may not even be able to leave my apartment. But I can at least take a holiday from blogging - oh yes.]