trains

Jakarta by rail: Airport Rail Link and Skytrain

jpatokal2 Comments

While it may not register very high on the radar of most worldtrotters, Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta Airport (CGK) overtook Singapore’s Changi as the busiest hub in South-East Asia in 2017, growing 8% to serve over 63 million passengers. Serving the 264 million people scattered over Indonesia’s 17,000 islands, 75% of these pax were domestic, and the airport has been growing furiously to meet demand.

As part of this growth, late in 2017, Jakarta rolled out both a rail link from its main airport to the city and a shuttle connecting the airport’s three terminals. I recently had the chance to try out both, so here’s the scoop.

Soekarno–Hatta Airport Skytrain (Kalayang)

The airport terminal shuttle, dubbed the Skytrain in English and the Kereta Melayang (“Floating Train”) aka Kalayang in Indonesian, opened in September 2017. The system links together the three terminals plus a station for trains to the city, about which more later.

At Terminal 3, the newest of the lot and the one used by all Garuda flights, the Skytrain station is outside the terminal, connected by an elevated walkway to Departures and by an escalator to Arrivals. At T1 & T2, which date from the 1980s, the Skytrain stations are across the street and require crossing a road — not great.

The Skytrain itself, built by obscure Korean company Woojin Industrial, feels mildly buggy and wildly overengineered. The stations are bulky & enormous (much more so that the Jakarta MRT itself), and while capable of automatic operation, they’re manually driven by not one but two staff. The lady in the photo above, who’s responsible solely for the “Doors are closing” type announcements, is not hiding her face from my camera, but the sun! The ride is slow (max speed 30km/h) and somewhat bumpy. And all this just to provide trains every 10-15 minutes, back and forth between 4 stations, meaning it can easily take up to 30 minutes from T3 to the train station: 5 min walking, up to 15 min to wait, then 10 minutes on the shuttle.

Soekarno–Hatta Airport Railink (KA Bandara)

Opened 26 December 2017, the “Railink” (sic) offers a 46-minute ride from Soekarno-Hatta Airport (CGK) to BNI City (Sudirman Baru) in the city center, with two stops along the way at Batu Ceper and Duri. In Indonesian, it’s mostly signposted as KA Bandara, KA being Kereta Api (“fire cart” aka train) and Bandara being “airport”. Travel times between central Jakarta and the airport by car are notoriously variable, taking an hour on a good day but 2-3 or more on bad days, so this should be wildly popular. Was it?

In a nutshell, no, not really. In addition to the mandatory Skytrain rumba described above, the system appears to go out of its way to discourage non-Indonesian riders. Tickets can only be purchased from ticket machines, which summarily reject most but not all non-Indonesian credit cards. The information counter staff tried to help by using their own, only for the reader to fail repeatedly with not one but two local Indonesian cards. One of them tried again at the ticket machine with their card, managing to get it to spit out a 70,000 IDR ticket (US$5, around half the price of a taxi), but when I tried to repay them with 100,000 IDR cash they didn’t have any change. They now suggested breaking a bill at the convenience store next door, but we were now approaching departure time, so I gave them a rather generous 30,000 IDR tip and hotfooted onto the train.

Incidentally, there are two other ways to short-circuit this mess:

  1. You can buy tickets online at railink.co.id, which apparently does accept foreign credit cards. However, you need to either buy your ticket for a specific time slot (plane late? too bad) or pay extra for a “Flexi” ticket that can be used for any train, and the web shop is beyond terrible: for example, you need to enter an Indonesian phone number (no country codes allowed), and if you make any mistake in filling out the form it’s cleared out completely!
  2. There’s currently a payment card war raging into Indonesia (Brizzi, Flazz, Blink, etc), and you can use some but not all of these to pay for your tickets on the spot, including the Brizzi cards sold at the convenience store.

Payments sorted, I got on the train, which was rattlingly empty. with six carriages containing perhaps 20 or so passengers. This wasn’t the train’s fault, as the Bombardier EA203 trainset was rather modern and pleasant, with air-con, comfy seating, USB power in the seats and even luggage racks by the doors. It was just rather odd having an entire carriage to myself!

The train left precisely on time and started its trundle toward the city. The initial 12 km of track are new, while the remaining 24 km of the route is on existing track shared with regular commuter trains and hence offering ground-level views of the “real” Jakarta. Jakarta’s commuter rolling stock is almost entirely secondhand from Japan, like the refurbished Tokyo Metro 6000 series train pictured above at Duri station, which I used to ride on my Chiyoda Line commute in my student days. The condition of the track is generally not great, with the train click-clacking along loudly and reversing direction at Duri for the final stretch into current terminus Sudirman Baru (“New Sudirman”), currently branded as BNI City after a sponsoring bank.

This shiny new station is rather slick and well laid out, with platforms underneath a concourse level that has shops in the middle and waiting taxis at one end. There are also a few signs vaguely pointing in the direction of MRT Dukuh Atas and the old Sudirman commuter station, both a few hundred meters away, but there’s no “proper” tunnel or bridge between the three. (July 2019 update: A connecting tunnel between the three is now open!)

At present, almost all trains terminate at BNI City, with only around 3 trains a day continuing all the way to Bekasi in eastern Jakarta. However, the plan is to run all trains to Manggarai in south Jakarta, the busiest train station in the city, where additional platforms are under construction. Once complete around April 2019, this should provide easy interchange to three of Jakarta’s commuter lines and boost ridership nicely.

I took the train back as well, and it worked fine, running exactly on schedule to boot. All in all, the link is surprisingly respectable and I intend to make the most of it when I visit, but there are a number of design flaws that make it much less useful than it could be.

  1. The biggest issue is the clunky forced Skytrain transfer, which could have been avoided entirely if the train line had been extended by an extra kilometer or two to connect directly with Terminal 3. Yes, this would have required either elevating the line or putting some of it in a tunnel, which would have been expensive, but then the extra Skytrain station would not have been necessary either.
  2. Sharing track with existing lines is a sensible cost-cutting measure, but having minimal to no provisions for regular and express trains to pass each other is not. This forces the train to slow down to the same speed as regular all-stops commuters, so it averages only 50km/h. If that speed could pushed up to just 72 km/h, the journey to the airport would take only 30 minutes.
  3. The payment mess is just inexcusable and gives a terrible first impression. I presume the insistence on cashless is a combination of wanting to be modern and making sure all money is accounted for, but since they’re already paying for several people to staff the counter, might as well take cash, no?

Next time, I’ll try out the rail link to MRT transfer, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the Greater Jakarta (Jabodebek) LRT fits in if/when completed around 2021.

More train adventures in Jakarta: MRT opening week

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Jakarta by rail: MRT opening week

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After a 13-year absence, I had the chance to visit the Indonesian capital Jakarta again, and as luck would have it I landed on the 2nd operating day of the long-awaited Jakarta MRT. So of course I went to check it out: I rode the MRT from end to end at Bundaran HI to Lebak Bulus, covering 15.7 km in 30 min, then backtracked to my office in the Sudirman CBD business district near Istora station.

Underground stations: Bundaran HI and Istora

The MRT’s 6 underground stations all look pretty much identical. 4 sloped, not terribly distinctive entrances from the ground, ticketing concourse underground, another escalator down to an island platform with trains running on the right side (although Indonesia drives on the left). Decoration is sparse to non-existent, with grey walls, a few orange highlights and occasional signage in the MRT’s distinctive shade of dark blue.

Since this was the first week of operation, tickets were not on sale yet and in fact the ticketing offices looked very unready to start operating next Monday, not least because fares were only decided this week. Also, is a single ticket machine really going to be handle the load?

That said, while rides are free this week, it wasn’t quite a free for all either, as you were supposed to have a barcoded ticket you can get online. Fortunately, as a bule gila (crazy foreigner) I was waved through anyway and even handed a printed barcode by friendly staff. Indonesian hospitality for the win!

Elevated station: Lebak Bulus

The 7 stations at the south end are all elevated and once again cast from an identical mold repeating the same pattern: ground, ticketing concourse, escalators up to side platforms. The design is sparse but elegant, with large white sails providing shelter while allowing breezes and half-height platform doors stopping passengers from falling onto the tracks.

Southern terminal Lebak Bulus is next to a depot of the same name, guarded by one of the countless mosques that dot the city.

Trains

The MRT uses modern rolling stock built by Japanese manufacturer Nippon Sharyo. The insides of the 6-car trainsets are spacious and built to handle crowds. Announcements are made in Indonesian and English at every station, with the station names jarringly read by a different voice from the rest and repeated to boot: “Stasiun berakhir <pause> LEBAK BULUS GRAB. LEBAK BULUS GRAB.” These announcements also include the stations’ commercial sponsors. Electronic signage is limited to small displays above the doors, which use illegibly small fonts to boot — a general theme for the system. Regular visitors to Japan will recognize the door opening and chimes, which are identical to those used in Tokyo.

Signage

Given that this is a brand new system built by the Japanese, who are generally masters of this stuff, signage in the system is really quite astonishingly bad. Not only is there very little of it, but font sizes are tiny, meaning you really need to squint, particularly for the line strip maps (top right) that are drawn in thin white on reflective black. The system also lacks a strong logo, with the “MJ” squiggle above used on occasion, but there’s nothing to distinguish MRT station entrances from random underpasses unless you’re close enough to read the signs.

Station maps are not much better: the ones on the platform show exit letters, but give no clue about what’s nearby. Only at Istora station tucked away in a corner outside the paid area was I able to find a proper vicinity map.

Overall

From a technological point of view, the MRT is a marvel and the first modern and efficient mode of public transport this megacity, soon set to be the world’s biggest, has ever seen.

My biggest surprise with the MRT, though, was its lack of popularity: the trains were rattlingly empty at 8-9 AM, which should be peak hour, and many of my fellow passengers were clearly tourists like me. Doubtless newness and the complicated free-but-book-in-advance ticket system are tamping down demand, but the limited route may also be somewhat to blame. The Bundaran HI to Blok M stretch of the route runs along Jakarta’s main drag Jalan Sudirman and parallels a highly successful Transjakarta busway line, so you’d expect this to be popular, but the final stretch to Lebak Bulus doesn’t really connect to anywhere: I suspect this was mostly chosen because there was free space for the depot.

Poor integration to other transport is also a major issue. The north end of the line has two sensible interchanges, one to the busway at Bundaran Hi and one at Dukuh Atas to the commuter rail network at Sudirman, but the south end has nothing. Work on a northern extension towards Kota and the old city officially started only last weekend with a target of 2024, while a east-west line remains on the drawing board and no southern extensions are even planned. The Jakarta LRT still has not opened and will not be anywhere near the MRT when it does, although there are vague plans for extensions. The only real hope is the 43 km Jabodebek (Greater Jakarta) LRT, which will connect a swathe of southeastern Jakarta to the MRT at Dukuh Atas. It’s around half complete as I type and might be open around 2021 if all goes well, although it’s already two years late.

On a more local level, Jakarta remains an extraordinarily pedestrian-hostile city and there appear to be precisely zero direct entrances from the MRT into the countless shopping malls and office buildings along the route — again a great contrast to Japan, where this is done as a matter of course.

All that said, it’s a good start, and at least it’s built and open — which is more than can be said for the twice-cancelled Jakarta Monorail. Here’s hoping it will take less than 13 years for the next line to come along.

From Siberia to Tibet: China as a Tourist

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So how is traveling around the less visited parts of China when you’re a tall, blond, distinctly non-Chinese-speaking alien?

Language

I have to state up front that my experience of China is likely pretty different from that of the average foreign visitor, since I’m reasonably fluent in Japanese and that gives a huge leg up for parsing Chinese: I can’t read larger chunks of text because the grammar is too different, but I can generally manage maps, simple websites and signage.  However, my spoken Chinese is terrible and my comprehension isn’t much better.

Nevertheless, I was positively surprised by the amount of English signage present.  Sometimes there was clearly a government edict at work — for example, every single shop in the villages near the Mutianyu Great Wall has English signs, just in case a tourist has a sudden urgent to acquire construction supplies or wholesale quantities of fertilizer — and equally often it was clearly run through an online translation tool, occasionally with hilarious results.  A large part of the “English” signage was actually just pinyin phonetics, so those Chinese who struggle with hanzi can still spell out SHE HUI ZHU YI and connect the red billboard with a hammer and sickle to socialism — but as a useful side effect, this meant that most trains, subways, buses etc were signposted in friendly Roman letters.

By comparison, English speakers were definitely on thinner ground.  We ran into a few in odd places, like a young Didi (Chinese Uber) driver in Xining, but when it came time to request a late checkout at one of Xining’s top hotels, the bellboy spoke more English than the three ladies behind the counter combined, and I still had to trot out my pidgin Mandarin.  Border crossings and security checkpoints were also invariably quick & wordless affairs, since staff vocabulary didn’t seem to extend much beyond “passport” and “ticket”.

Would we ever really have been in trouble without knowing Chinese?  No, but any scraps you can pick up beforehand will certainly helped.

Civility

China — and I’m referring specifically to the People’s Republic here — gets a pretty bad rep for being tourist-hostile, and if you read the Stay safe section on Wikivoyage it’s easy to come away expecting that your children will be kidnapped and/or run over while you’re choking on toxic air and sold overpriced tea by attractive but starving art students.

Now it’s fair to say that if it’s personal space you’re after, most of China is the wrong place to be: in a city like Beijing, with twice the population of New York, you’re going to get a lot of crowds and the occasional sharp elbow.  Interestingly, most of these belonged to the elderly, who were either taking their Confucian mores of mandatory respect for the aged seriously, or had honed their queue-cutting skills fighting for scraps of cabbage during the Great Leap Forward.  Overall, though, most queues were kinda-sorta respected (heavy security presence must help), people mostly waited for others to get off the subway before barging on themselves, and even train stations felt more like busy airports than the crush of desperate humanity that is an Indian train station’s waiting room or ticket office.  And while there are a few places like Beijing’s Silk Alley (now just a shopping mall) and that drinks shop atop the Mutianyu Great Wall that will happily fleece foreigners for every last yuan they’ve got, if you pick your own places, you’ll pay what the locals do: we never paid more than printed on the menu or otherwise agreed.

We did run into a couple of power-tripping bureaucrats, most memorably an attendant on our Beijing-Xi’an trian, who completely flipped out over my dad’s effrontery in using the bottom bunk in our 4-bunk cabin when his ticket said top bunk — never mind that we had purchased all four seats.  A friendly English-speaking lady from a nearby cabin was roped in to help translate, and after much foot-stomping and gnashing of teeth the attendant admitted defeat when we pointed out that this was a non-stop train, so it was physically impossible for anybody else to board en route and claim that bunk.

Toilets in China are also worth a mention, since the country has a reputation for unutterably grim facilities.  We found a few at some of the less visited Tibetan monasteries, but as a rule they were generally modern, tolerably clean and generally a cut above Russia or Mongolia.   You will, however, need to learn to squat and carry your own toilet paper, since Western-style thrones are few and far between and TP is a national treasure only grudgingly doled out once authorities have scrutinized your schnozzle.

One final component of the China experience is security, surveillance and bureaucracy, but that’s a topic large enough to deserve its own blog post.  (Coming soon.)

Internet

Speaking of security and surveillance, one of the more annoying parts of travel in China is the Great Firewall, which keeps getting higher and tighter: virtually all name-brand Western services (Gmail, Facebook, WhatsApp, Google Maps, Wikipedia, Reddit, Instagram etc) are now inaccessible.  I had prepared by setting up ExpressVPN in advance, and it worked fine when on wifi, but when roaming on my Australian SIM, the connection was censored and throttled to be hopelessly slow, making using the VPN nearly impossible.

In the end I bought a China Unicom prepaid SIM, which was several orders of magnitude faster and well worth the investment, but Western services remained glitchy.  For example, on Google Maps, local data is not just spotty and out of date, but places were often hundreds of meters in the wrong direction, and even if you could use WhatsApp, nobody you meet could.  So the only way to go is to dip your toe into the local ecosystem.

  • WeChat/QQ (微信 Weixin) is the local juggernaut and the de facto choice of messaging.  It also has the very popular WeChat Pay (微信支付 Weixin Zhifu) payment system, which has recently started accepting non-Chinese credit cards, but registration is complicated and apparently the rules vary continually.  When I signed up, I needed a Chinese number and a local trusted user to verify me, but no Chinese ID or bank account; others report being required to provide one or both of these though.  It’s also important to download the mainland China version of the app directly off weixin.qq.com, not the overseas version from App Store/Play Store.
  • Baidu Maps (百度地图 Baidu Ditu) is the local equivalent of Google Maps.  In addition to being Chinese-only, the UI is pretty busy and takes some getting used to, but place search and directions for driving, public transport and walking are all pretty good.  (Weird quirk: travel times for bus were systematically inflated by 30-60 min.)
  • Ctrip (携程旅行 Xiéchéng Lǚxíng) is your best source for long-distance travel information, including detailed train schedules.
  • Mobike (摩拜 Móbài) is great for booking some of the ride share bikes littering the streets of China’s larger cities.  Rides start from Y1 a pop and the same app & credit works fine in Australia too.

Transport

It’s difficult to overstate just how much investment China has put into planes, trains and roads over the past decades, or how much pent up demand this has unlocked.  For example, we took the CRH bullet train from Xi’an to Xining, fully expecting this recently opened line from a 2nd-tier city to a 3rd-tier city to be a white elephant, but no — the train was packed to the last seat. Xi’an has sprouted 3 lines and 91 km of metro in the past 7 years, all of it packed, and Beijing is still catching up after opening 22 lines covering 608 km.  Train stations like Beijing West are not enormous (just) because the government likes massive buildings, but because they have to be: the 34-platform, 60-million-pax-per-year Xi’an North is by some measures the largest in Asia, with a central concourse that puts most stadiums to shame, and it was still difficult to find a seat.  Even Lhasa airport was bursting at the seams.  The only empty Chinese transport hub during the entire trip was the shiny new international wing of Chongqing Jiangbei Airport, but I suspect we were there just at the wrong time during the afternoon lull, since CKG too has seen 1,000% (yes, three zeroes) international passenger growth since 2009.

Food

In short, the food in China was amazing, if often a bit hit and miss since we were traveling without much local advice and mostly choosing places by convenience.  The learning curve for “real” Chinese food can be steep though, so here’s a trek up the scale.

Crowd-pleasers abounded in Beijing: the justly famous Peking Duck (Xiheyaju
羲和雅居 was among the best meals of the trip) and the less famous but no less tasty zhajiangmian (炸醬麵) aka Chinese spaghetti bolognese.  Roubing (肉餅) meat pies are also widely available, although the precise origin of the meat may be a mystery at times.

Mildly more adventurous or surprising were the many Muslim eateries of Xining, serving up a constellation of noodles.  Even with basic knowledge of hanzi and Google Translate, you never quite knew what you’d get, but rarely were we disappointed.  One Chinese innovation that will take the West by storm sooner or later is the conveyor-belt hotpot: take a personal mini pot, select a broth and dipping sauces, then pick what you like from the parade going past you and pay for what you ate.  Magic!  And if you put too much chilli in your sauce, cool down with some yogurt (酸奶 suānnǎi), which is sold everywhere on the streets.  And if all else fails, head to a hotel breakfast buffet and eat an cute animal-shaped steamed bun.

At the more challenging end of the spectrum were Yunnanese cuisine, which appears to consist mostly of mushrooms and unusual veggies; the enormous gelatinous niangpi (酿皮) noodles of Qinghai served with bread-like steamed gluten dipped in chilli, the Chinese trucker favorite of “big plate chicken” (大盘鸡 dàpánjī), basically a stew of chicken, potato and lots of chilli, and the Chongqing classic xiǎomiàn (小面), the deceptively named “small noodles” that pack a big numbing-hot mala punch.

And oh, if you’re reading this and thinking “that’s nothing, once in Shenzhen I ate…”, go chew on this previous blog entry for a while.

<<< Lhasa and Tibet | Hong Kong and Macau >>>

 

From Siberia to Tibet: Life on a Train

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Many writers wax lyrical about the romance of long-distance train travel, but on this trip I sampled four them — Irkutsk to Ulaanbaatar, Ulaanbaatar to Beijing, Beijing to Xi’an, and Xining to Lhasa — and the sad truth is that the passenger trains in these parts are strictly utilitarian workhorses, inferior to airplanes on virtually every measure of speed or comfort.   Here’s the lowdown on life in a 4-berth sleeper (kupé in Russia, 软卧 ruǎnwò in China).

Eat

When you’re on a train for 24 hours or more, you’ve got to eat something, and this leaves you with three options.

The first and most obvious option is restaurant cars, and the Mongolian ones with their intricate wood carvings and embroidered tablecloths even look quite attractive.  Alas, the food they serve ranges from bland but edible, like our Chinese breakfast set composed mostly of sausage, celery and chilli, to bland and near-inedible, such as the incredibly gristly beef served on the Mongolian train — I was picking bits out of my teeth for the next two days.  Perhaps we should have taken the hint from the plastic bags of frozen beef sitting in the corridor, tenderizing in the midsummer heat of the Gobi Desert.

Alternatively, you can try to buy food on station platforms, but this presents a number of practical problems.  First, stops are few and far between and rarely aligned with mealtimes.  Second, stops are short and on arrival you neither have any idea what the options are nor where to find them.  Third, if you do find something food-like, it’s often unclear how many days those mince-meat khuushuurs sitting on a table have been fermenting under the Mongolian sun.  We did manage to swing some pretty decent piroshki pastries in Ulan-Ude, plus rye bread and boiled eggs in Mongolia, but it really is the luck of the draw and you can’t count on finding more than packaged snacks this way.

Finally, you can bring your own food, but with no refrigeration or heating available (aside from hot water), you’ll be hard pressed to expand your culinary horizons beyond packaged bread, instant noodles and the giant Russian rye croutons called grenki.  (Best flavor: garlic with garlic dip.  You’re welcome.)  A useful compromise is to buy a meal at your departure station: you’re not going to find much more than fast food, but even KFC is likely tastier, cheaper and healthier than the alternatives.

All that said, you can generally rely on the restaurant cars to supply lukewarm beer at only mildly extortionate prices, which brings me to…

Drink

Russian and Mongolian trains forbid drinking alcoholic beverages on board; fortunately, this being Russia and Mongolia, beer is not considered alcohol.  (Seriously.)  Needless to say, this rule is widely ignored by all and sundry, although it’s generally wise to close your compartment door if you have one and avoid tippling at times when conductors are on the prowl.

The one free drink provided in abundant quantities is boiling hot water, supplied by a coal or wood fired boiler at the end of each carriage.  If you’re lucky, there may even be a thermos bottle in your cabin, which you can use to stock your own supply.  Bring along some teabags, instant coffee or cocoa, and you can stay caffeinated.  A pedantic nit: most travelers call these samovars, but in Russian they’re actually “titans” (титан).

Non-hot water, on the other hand, is in distinctly short supply, as the water from the bathroom taps is not drinkable.  Bring along more than you think you will need, particularly if it’s hot or high outside.  As for taking a shower or a bath, forget about it.

Poop

Yes, this section has no pictures.  (You’re welcome.)

The upside to strictly functional trains is that their toilets are also unencumbered with pneumatic vacuums and mysterious blue liquids.  Instead, when you press the lever, the bottom opens up and the contents are deposited straight onto the tracks, followed by a slightly apologetic trickle of water.  While this does an admirable job of preventing the toilet from clogging, it does also mean that the doors are locked while the train is stationary, including during those multi-hour border crossings.

On Chinese trains, you will also encounter squat toilets, although there are usually a few thrones to be found as well.  The upside to these is that, no matter how filthy the rest of the room, only your feet need make contact; the downside is that whatever your feet make contact with is likely to be unpleasant.  This is why everybody on board brings flip-flops to wear.   And whether your train is Russian, Mongolian or Chinese, you’ll want to bring toilet paper and soap as well.

Sleep

Fed, hydrated and voided, it’s time to sleep.  The uninitiated are often tempted by the idea of a hotel on wheels: just slumber away peacefully on board and you’ll arrive at your destination not just refreshed, but having saved on a night’s hotel bill!  Reality is more complicated.

Even when not manufactured in the DDR, the berths are generally uncomfortable, even in the misnamed Russian “luxe” or Chinese “soft sleeper”.  The sheets are nailed to plyboard (we ended up buying an inflatable camping mattress because my dad’s back was wrecked by the four nights of the Moscow-Irkutsk stretch), the blankets are covered in stains of indeterminate origin and getting onto the top bunks requires acrobatics.  If the window is closed, it’ll be stuffy and hot inside; if it’s open, every rattle, clank and blast of the horn is amplified and your toes will freeze.   While the Trans-Siberian and most railways in China are continuously welded and thus smooth, the Trans-Mongolian is not, meaning your bedtime lullaby will be a constant clunk-clunk, clunk-clunk.

In addition, border crossings are both interminable and inevitably timed to happen in the middle of night.  It was past midnight when we finally entered Mongolia after two hours of inspections, and while our arrival into China was at 9 PM, we all had to get off the train and wait for 5 hours, until 2 AM, while they swapped the bogies from Russian to Chinese gauge.

Unsurprisingly, you’re likely to wake up groggy and grumpy.  If you’re at your destination already, you’ll be decanted onto the streets and condemned to wander until your hotel opens; if not, you’ll probably catch up by napping in your bunk during the day, throwing your sleep cycle even more out of whack.

So why do it?

Well, that was quite the litany of whinging, why would anybody voluntarily subject themselves to this then?

It’s an opportunity to idle.  There is way more time than there are things to do, so you can read a book, play cards, study the finer points of Russian grammar on Duolingo, or just take a nap — and all the earlier kvetching aside, your train bunk is still more spacious and comfy than even a business class seat on an airplane.

Traveling by train, you get a sense of distance.  I flew Beijing to Irkutsk in 2.5 hours, and saw basically nothing even from the window seat.  Traveling the same route by train took 54 hours, and while I still can’t say I really know what it felt like to cross the Gobi by camel, now at least I have some reference point for the sheer scale of the feat.

But above all, you see a slice of real life.  It’s not always pretty (any train traveler in India will have a hard time unseeing the spectacle of the track sides being used as a public lavatory), but simply put, without taking the train you wouldn’t see ramshackle Siberian dachas, rusting factories around Ulan-Ude, yurt cities around Ulan Bator, ghastly commieblocks around a Mongolian military base in the Gobi desert, Chinese factories spewing grey smoke into the skies of Inner Mongolia, the green hills of Shaanxi, the shaggy yaks wandering around the plateaus of Tibet, the massive scale of construction around Lhasa and more.  This trip wouldn’t have been the same at all without it, and I have zero regrets.

On to Mongolia!

<<< Irkutsk & Lake Baikal | Ulaanbaatar, Gorkhi-Terelj and the Gobi Desert >>>

Beer, Bacon and Bargirls: Train 9, First Class, Riyadh-Dammam

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As a bit of a train buff, I tried my best to google up some info — any info — about the services of the Saudi Railways Organization before our trip, but virtually none was forthcoming, and eventually it was Trsqr who did the (considerable) legwork of reserving tickets. He rustled up the number of Dammam‘s train station from somewhere and got an Arabic speaker to proxy, and it turned out that even the SRO website’s schedules are inaccurate. There was, however, still an evening train from Riyadh to Dammam, it just left an hour earlier, and there was availability in all three classes: Second, First and the delightfully named “Rehab”, which I’m told is always patronized by Amy Winehouse and Britney Spears on their visits to the Kingdom. Second cost SR60, First was SR75 and Rehab was SR130, so we opted for First and showed up at the train station half an hour before departure.

Like most governmental buildings in Saudi, Riyadh‘s train station is improbably huge, especially given that it caters to all of four trains a day. All passengers were subjected to a quick security check, and the guards in proper TSA style even demanded the removal of beep-inducing footwear, but at least liquids were not on the no-ride list.

SRO doesn’t assign seats, but finding two seats wasn’t a problem — although we were shooed out of the front-facing ones, these being reserved for families, and kicked back into the rear-facing bachelor section. “First Class” hardly qualifies as luxurious, but neither was there much to complain about: it was clean and the seats were reasonably comfy, with tray tables and a token amount of recline. Second Class seemed to be much the same, with slightly narrower pitch, while Rehab had big leather seats and roof-mounted TVs featuring the latest in Islamic programming, and their pax also get to use the VIP lounges at the stations. Snack carts equipped with an ever-dwindling array of plastic-packed pastries, chips and drinks rumbled through every now and then, and the cafeteria car offered more of the same.

The problem with riding trains by night is that there’s nothing to see, especially when the line passes through the vast emptiness of central Saudi. It was supposed to be a 3:45 trip, but that much time had already passed by the time we finally pulled into Hofuf, much of it alternatively sitting or crawling through the desert at a siding while we waited for the train in the opposite direction. (The entire Saudi network is single-tracked.) It was thus past 1 AM when we finally pulled in Dammam, five hours after we left.

Dammam’s terminal is an exact carbon copy of Riyadh’s, to the point that I couldn’t help wondering if this was all some colossal prank and we’d somehow missed the train turning around and returning to Riyadh… but no, there was a tang of salt in the air, and a lunatic cabbie (is there any other kind in Saudi?) careened us into the Holiday Inn Al-Khobar in no time.