An underlying assumption in our Tuesday plans was that Liuyuan – Jiayuguan was a commuter route with scores of 3-hour trains (my friend told me so, and I never bothered to check him on it with tielu.org, an rkkwan tip that has proved invaluable). Well, he/we was/were dead wrong.

When we got to the ticket window, we learned that there were 2 trains of interest, a 320p departure, arriving at 8:30 (still enough time to catch the wall, but not cool) and an 11p train, getting in at 2a. Because we loathed the thought of hanging around Liuyuan for 8 hours and wanted to see the wall, we opted for the former.

But, once on board, we learned that our train would take nearly 7 hours to travel those ~200 miles, a 10p arrival. (We didn’t believe it, but it was true.) The train reminded me a NY subway, only with some semblance of seats. It was slow, really slow. The odd thing was that the attendants were far more diligent than their counterparts on the nice trains (must have mopped the floor 10 times); they were truly proud of their work to the extent that they resented the “slow train” designation. In fact, one told us that, while we may refer to it as the 慢车, they consider it the 同行车.



On that note, we simply sucked it up, played cards, took turns walking the length of the train, and took pictures of some really depressing cities from the window(early editions of the China LP remark that foreigners were forbidden from disembarking at many/most stations in Gansu because the PRC government wanted to keep the poverty under wraps).











Oh, I should point out that many of the stations we stopped at (out of more than 20) lacked necessities such as buildings, pavement, and roads altogether; people would simply get off and pile into a the back of a on open bed truck and plow their way through the desert.

In the end, we made it, but not until 10p (even with China’s single time zone, darkness had set in).