Hi. I'm Nick Bekker. My wife, Trish, and I are missionaries working in Lampang, North Thailand. This blog was intended to be my musings and questions about life and my personal observations of Thai life and culture. At present, however, it consists mainly of our monthly newsletters.
I work for OMF, a missionary organisation started by James Hudson Taylor in 1865. First called the"China Inland Mission" (CIM), and focused on China, OMF started working in Thailand in the early 1950's after the Communist takeover in China forced all foreign missionaries out of the country. For more info about OMF's history click here.
Our first year in Thailand was spent learning Thai full-time. At the beginning of 2004, we moved to Chiang Mai in the north to help with a new church plant. In June 2006, I was appointed as the Regional Leader of the North Thailand region.
We went "home" to South Africa for 7 months in August 2007 and returned "home" to Thailand in April 2008. We have recently moved to the town of Lampang in north Thailand.
This is the second part of some of my crazy experiences with trains in China.
What Was I Thinking?
I was staying in Shanghai and had to make a trip to meet some people in Hangzhou, about 170km south of Shanghai. The journey takes about an hour in a high-speed train. Being the seasoned traveller and well-adjusted digital immigrant that I am, I had purchased my tickets on the internet weeks in advance. There was no way I was going to mess this up. The day before my trip, I meticulously planned my route from my hotel to the Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station, giving myself plenty of time to get there. My train departure time was 8:36a.m. - a small warning bell should have gone off in my head when I saw that departure time. Why 8:36? Why not 8:30 or 8:45, even 8:35, but 8:36? Anyway, I got to the station at around 8a.m.
The first surprise of the day was the size of the station. I am not exaggerating when I say that I have flown on international flights out of airports smaller than the Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station.
Covering an area of 1.3 million square metres, and with 16 platforms, it is the largest railway station in Asia. Undaunted, I found my departure gate and since I had plenty of time, set off to find some breakfast. Having travelled on trains in Asia before, I wasn’t too concerned about time. In Thailand for instance, departure times are printed on tickets merely to give one an approximate indication of the day on which the train will be leaving. Being such a seasoned traveller and confident in my experience of Asian train timetables, I took my time and enjoyed my breakfast at a leisurely pace. Afterwards, I even stopped on the way to my gate to buy some gum and pick up a bottle of water, which is given free to all ticket holders - I thought that was rather a nice touch. I arrived at the gate to the platform from which my train was departing at 8:30a.m, but then I noticed that there was an “A” gate and a “B” gate, at opposite sides of the concourse. I was at the B gate. I quickly looked at my ticket and in the midst of a lot of Chinese characters I saw an “A”, but a little further down, I also saw a “B”. I wasn’t sure if I needed to be at A or B, so I walked about 100 metres across to A and asked one of the passengers queuing there. Fortunately, he spoke English and informed me that my ticket was for B.
I should briefly explain at this juncture, that this station, unlike any other I have ever been in, is built above the actual railway lines. The gate is a solid high-tech sliding door which leads through to an escalator, which descends down to the platform. One is unable to see any trains in the concourse area and the first glimpse you get of a train is when you get to the bottom of the escalator.
Anyway, it was now 8:32a.m. as I quickly made my way back across the concourse to gate B and joined the long queue there. I wasn’t at all surprised when by 8:34a.m. the gate still hadn’t opened. By 8:36a.m. I was feeling smugly justified in my assessment of Asian train time-tables. Then my eye fell on a small sign in English just outside the sliding door of the gate that read, “no entrance to platform permitted after 5 minutes before train departure”.
Huh!? I saw the words, but something was not computing. I read it again. There was no mistaking what it said and yet, here I was in a queue at 8:37a.m. with hundreds of other travellers waiting for the 8:36a.m. train.
Or... were... we?
With growing trepidation, I read the sign again and then in a moment of startling clarity, noticed, for the first time, that the tickets in the hands of my fellow passengers were a different colour to the ticket clutched in my, now suddenly sweaty, hand. I quickly looked at the ticket belonging to the chap next to me and saw that his ticket was for the 8:55a.m. train. I felt the blood draining from my head as I realised that my train was gone already and these fellow passengers whom I was happily queuing with were actually not fellow passengers, but travellers getting ready to depart on the next train... because everybody knows that train schedules in China run like clockwork and that the gates to the platforms open about 15 minutes before the trains depart and close exactly 5 minutes before departure...don’t they?
In May I had the privilege of travelling to China. Apart from some amazing cross-cultural experiences, I also had some interesting train-related experiences which I will blog about in two or three parts.
The Need for Speed
My travel schedule included a few days in Shanghai, so I turned to Google for some information and travel tips. There I discovered that Shanghai has the world’s first commercial magnetic levitation train that travels from the Pudong International Airport into town. Its called the Maglev. Its not the most creative name, I’ll admit, but I’m sure it has a more exciting Chinese name. The Maglev is a marvel of science and engineering. It has no wheels, axels or bearings, instead it has a bunch of magnets which lift, suspend, steer and propel it - very quickly. It was completed in 2004 at a cost of $1.2 billion. Naturally, I put it on my “to do” list.
So it came about that with eager anticipation I collected my luggage and followed the overhead signs to the Maglev train station after I landed in Shanghai. With mounting excitement, I purchased my ticket and took up a strategic position right in front of the platform gate and waited. After a short while, the gate opened, and in true Chinese fashion, everybody pushed and shoved past me. By the time I had made it onto the train and stowed my baggage, all the seats facing forwards had been taken. Unfazed, I took a seat that was facing backwards and waited for the adventure to begin. There was a twinge of apprehension as I wondered if my fillings would all fly out of my mouth like BB pellets and stick to the floor when the magnetic field was turned on. It turned out that my fears were groundless, and with all my fillings and other metal bits still firmly in place, we moved out of the station with a silent woosh. I watched the speedometer above the door as within seconds we passed the 100km/h mark, then 150, 200, 250, 300, 350, 400. Just when I thought we had reached top speed, it inched upward to 415, 420, 425 and held steady at 430km/h, easily setting a new land-speed record for me.
Now it must be said that I am all for speed, and that’s why I took this train. But, to be honest, it is somewhat disconcerting to hurtle backwards at 430km/h. As I flashed backwards above the Shanghai traffic at 430km/h some doubts flashed through my mind. Let’s face it. We have all at some time or another purchased some cheap “made in China” electronic marvel that either has not worked from the outset, or has died the second time we’ve used it. We have also all heard some of the horror stories about lack of quality control and corners cut on Chinese construction projects. I wondered what would happen if a few magnets were to fall off the Maglev and get sucked into the transwarp inductor, causing the flux capacitor to explode and the train to be launched off the track at 430km/h, like some North Korean test missile. I briefly pondered if there would be any remains to identify should the unthinkable happen. At that moment, unseen by me because I was facing backwards, another Maglev train approached from the front and passed our train on my side of the carriage with the noise of ... well, a train travelling at 400km/h. Two walls of air being pushed by two fast trains collided with a combined speed of more than 800km/h, making a lot of sudden and unexpected noise and causing the train to jolt quite violently. Whilst I’m sure, with the benefit of hindsight, that there was plenty of room between the two trains, it felt to me in that instant that the other train was mere millimetres away from my left elbow which was resting on the window. I instinctively jerked my arm away and I guess my normally cool, calm and collected demeanour gave way temporarily to an expression of sheer unbridled terror, because the gentleman sitting opposite me, who had seen the other train coming, was unable to prevent himself from grinning broadly. I was not amused.
My heart rate had just about returned to normal when we glided to a silent stop, the 30km journey having taken a mere 7 minutes. You’ve got to hand it to the Chinese, for all the cheap junk that comes out of their country, they sure know how to build a fast train.
