Transportation on a long weekend in China

I wrote about our long weekend in Yangzhou in my last post. That was about how we spent our time while we were in Yangzhou. I wanted to dedicate that post to our experience as tourist within the city. What I left out was our experience leading up to the trip and at the tail end of it and that will be the subject of this post.

This Yangzhou trip was hatched only about 3 days prior to the day of the trip. After we made the decision to go, we made the appropriate plans to go. Since we don't own a car here in China (mostly for our own safety) we can either take the extensive network of trains or buses. Here in China the cost of riding the trains is lower than long distance bus. This is probably due to the very high ridership on the railways. The train is a very important mode of transportation because of the affordability over flying

For us the better alternative is the train since it is faster and safer than riding a bus where the driver thinks he is Michael Schumacher. Besides, there are no flights available for such a short distance. We were able to secure train tickets on an express train going to Yangzhou, but all trains coming back to Shanghai were completely sold out. This meant that on the return leg we had to take our chances with the bus. We made our way to the long distance bus station in Yangzhou Sunday morning as we were going to leave for Shanghai that evening. The bus station was packed with travelers buying tickets and this foreshadowed things to come.

We purchased tickets for the 5:20PM bus for Shanghai. We arrived at the bus station that afternoon at around 5:05 and we immediately realized things are different from our previous experiences. The bus depot was more crowded than normal and as we approach the Shanghai departure counter we realized that there was a scrum of people waiting desperately to leave. There was no way to make our way to the counter to even inquire about our 5:20 bus as the wall of people was about 15 deep. We immediately realized that we better make our way past the ticket takers and to the buses outside to see if we can get on our scheduled bus. We went to the Suzhou departure counter which was less crowded. After about 5 minutes of waiting the ticket taker at the Suzhou counter left her post for a brief moment. That was the opportunity that everyone was looking for and a stream of people including us went though the ticket counter to the waiting buses outside. We quickly spotted the bus to Shanghai and frantically boarded the bus to Shanghai. The driver who was taking the ticket did not even bother check our tickets to see if we were boarding the right bus to Shanghai.

After we boarded and had time to reflect, I began to realized what has happened. Basically the bus depot was not able to control the large crowd in the bus station. The mentality of the riders when encountered with this kind of situation is to make sure they are able to get on a bus and not get stranded in case buses got overbooked. This created a situation where the crowd became agitated and eventually the authorities lost control of the crowd. I wondered how long we would have had to wait if it wasn't for a ticket taker at a different departure counter leaving her post for a moment. This was a potentially dangerous situation, which I am sure has been replayed in China many times as there isn't an adequate infrastructure to handle the large population of China.

This is a period in China's history where a burgeoning middle class have leisure time. This creates a strain on its infrastructure especially during holiday weekends and holiday weeks (yes holiday week imagine the horror of that).

These are the kind of experiences that makes me think twice about living in China permanently. There are many benefits that I enjoy from living here in China over America, but there are also many difficulties where there is nothing one can do.