Travelling by bus for an hour for less than 2EUR? It’s possible in China. You just have to know how. Of course, you can make it easy for yourself and book a guided tour, which usually costs over 100 EUR. But we prefer to travel with the locals. In this article, I write about our experiences travelling by train, bus and metro in China.
Underground (Metro) in big cities
Life in cities like Beijing or Xian would be almost unimaginable without the metro (subway). The metro is a quick and easy way to get from A to B. There is a map of the metro lines in every city. When you are down in the entrance area, you can buy physical tickets from a machine. However, no cards are accepted. You need the Alipay app (payment via QR code). If the machine doesn’t work, there is also a counter where you can buy tickets from an employee.
The easiest way to do this is to activate the corresponding metro in the Alipay app. You can simply hold out your cell phone at the barriers. This requires a QR code from Alipay. However, this is not the QR code that you need at the cash desk. The code for public transport can be found on the Alipay homepage under “Transport”. There you can also select the city you are in. It then displays the available means of transportation (see screenshots below). The advantage: you never have to think about how often you have to change and whether you are getting off at the right place. The correct price is automatically charged when you leave the metro.
Ride the bus like the locals
We usually travelled to the sights by bus. At every bus stop there is a sign with the journey times, but we were never able to decipher them. Because there are so many people in China, you don’t have to worry about having to wait a long time for the bus. We always looked up the departure times and connections on Amap (Gaode Maps). You can always use the ticket office of the respective attraction as the destination of the route. This always worked best. Our initial internet searches were mostly unsuccessful. Some of the tourist buses that we read about in reports were no longer available, so we always ended up taking the public bus. Amap always showed us the way to the bus stop and where we had to change buses.
You can pay on the bus with Alipay. When boarding, you can hold out the previously generated code and then the flat rate (usually 2-4 RMB per journey) is charged. So whether you are travelling on the bus for 10 or 30 minutes, you always pay the same amount. There were rare occasions when we could only pay with Wechat. For example, on the shuttle bus from Zhangye airport to the city (flat rate of 20 RMB per journey).
For long-distance buses, for example from Zhangye to Danxia Geopark (Rainbow Mountains), we asked at the hotel reception for the bus station for locals. This bus only travelled from Xiguan Bus Station (west bus station) to Danxia Geopark a few times a day and you had to buy a ticket at the counter for 15 RMB per person. That’s less than 2 EUR for an hour’s journey on the red bus.
Travelling through China at 350 km/h
Super punctual, clean and well organised. That’s how we experienced train journeys in China. Some trains reach speeds of up to 350 km/h, but run extremely smoothly. Basically, you can travel through the whole country by train, it just takes time. Our longest train journey took over 10 hours from Lijiang to Guilin and cost around 80 EUR per person in 2nd class. Of course you can always fly, but this is much more expensive.
The few seats in 1st class are always booked up very quickly. However, we were also very satisfied in 2nd class. There were usually five seats in a row (instead of four as in 1st class). There are sockets everywhere on the train to charge your cell phone. Only the fellow travelers are sometimes a bit annoying. Once a guest wanted to cook rice and spilled the whole container on the floor. Entertainment was also provided, as some people were loudly watching their cell phone videos and you could hear them everywhere. Headphones are not common here.
Book trains via Alipay
In China, you can buy train tickets at least 14 days in advance. The official website of the train company is 12306.cn. However, we have never managed to book tickets there because the site was often overloaded.
That’s why we booked all our seats at home on Trip.com. We paid a reservation fee so that Trip.com could secure the tickets on the earliest possible day. Unfortunately, this only worked for the first journey. For all other train journeys, we found out by chance that Trip.com had not managed to reserve a seat for us. We weren’t even notified. Fortunately, we were able to cancel the reservation free of charge.
For the rest of the trip, we bought all our tickets via the Alipay app. More precisely, with the 12306 mini-app on the Alipay home screen with automatic translation function. This way, we were always sure that the train really existed and that we had a seat. And if our plans changed, we could adjust the bookings in the app (e.g. time, date). You may have to confirm your identity after a certain number of bookings. We went past a counter at the station after the fourth booking and showed our passport to verify our account. After that, everything worked fine for the rest of the trip.
As you have to enter your passport number when booking your ticket, you no longer need a physical ticket. This means that only your passport is scanned at the station. Because the railway stations in China are often very large and you still have to go through security checks, we were always at the station at least 30-45 minutes before the train departed.
To get into the station, you have to scan your luggage and show your ticket (passport). Then you look for the right waiting area (gate) for the train. As soon as the gate opens, tourists have to queue in the “manual lane”. This can be recognized by the fact that an employee scans all passports manually. For the Chinese, everything runs automatically with their ID. The gate usually closes 5-10 minutes before departure. There are signs on the platform indicating where each carriage stops so that you are queuing at the right place. After the train journey, you have to scan your pass a third time: At the terminus, a check is made to ensure that you have got off at the right place.
