Getting out of the Zhengzhou airport was very quick and efficient, no lines at
immigration or at the taxi stand. The taxi ride from the airport to the train station
took about 50 minutes, and I still had an hour to pick up my pre-booked tickets
and get on my 5 pm high speed train to Luoyang - or so I thought.
Unfortunately the online train ticket service let me down badly this time. I had booked and paid for my tickets at www.china-train-tickets.com a couple of weeks earlier. They e-mail you a letter with all the details and booking numbers, which you are meant to take to the ticket counters together with your passport to pick up your train tickets. Unfortunately, the girl at the ticket counter had never seen a letter like this, and I think she tried to explain in Mandarin that there was no train available. After some lengthy discourse involving lots of hand gesturing and her getting involved another colleague who spoke about three words of English (while the line of about 30 people behind me was getting visibly and audibly more and more impatient), I somehow managed to buy new tickets. That in itself would have been OK, since it only cost my a couple extra hundred RMB, but worse than that, the next available fast train to Luoyang was at 8:30pm, so I had more than 4 hours to kill at the train station in Zhengzhou. (Walking around the city was not really an option, because I had my luggage with me, and it was a nice and humid 36 degrees outside.) I do not know if it was the fault of china-train-tickets.com or if the girl at the ticket counter just did not understand that I was trying to pick up tickets rather than buy new ones (I suspect the latter, but if I had received a pick up letter in Chinese that could have solved the problem too), but I will definitely try a different online train ticket service next time I get on a train in China.
Unfortunately the online train ticket service let me down badly this time. I had booked and paid for my tickets at www.china-train-tickets.com a couple of weeks earlier. They e-mail you a letter with all the details and booking numbers, which you are meant to take to the ticket counters together with your passport to pick up your train tickets. Unfortunately, the girl at the ticket counter had never seen a letter like this, and I think she tried to explain in Mandarin that there was no train available. After some lengthy discourse involving lots of hand gesturing and her getting involved another colleague who spoke about three words of English (while the line of about 30 people behind me was getting visibly and audibly more and more impatient), I somehow managed to buy new tickets. That in itself would have been OK, since it only cost my a couple extra hundred RMB, but worse than that, the next available fast train to Luoyang was at 8:30pm, so I had more than 4 hours to kill at the train station in Zhengzhou. (Walking around the city was not really an option, because I had my luggage with me, and it was a nice and humid 36 degrees outside.) I do not know if it was the fault of china-train-tickets.com or if the girl at the ticket counter just did not understand that I was trying to pick up tickets rather than buy new ones (I suspect the latter, but if I had received a pick up letter in Chinese that could have solved the problem too), but I will definitely try a different online train ticket service next time I get on a train in China.
After killing 4 hours at the not very nice
Zhengzhou railway station (Note, that Zhengzhou has two train stations. I made the mistake to chose the older main station. There is also Zhengzhou East, which is much more modern and only serves high-speed trains. And I suspect there would have been a better chance of finding an English speaking counter, or at least hanging out there for 4 hours would have been a bit more pleasant.) Once I got on my evening train though, the journey
was very smooth and fairly quick. The high speed train from Zhengzhou to Luoyang
(which is on the line to Xian) takes just over 30 minutes,
I ended up arriving at my hotel in Luoyang just after 10pm. So, in the end really not a big problem, just one of those things that makes travelling alone in a country where you don't speak the language an exciting adventure.
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