Flexibility is key factor for successful journeys
Every year in the days leading up to the Spring Festival, China is the scene of the world’s largest human migration.
Thomas Lehmann, a development coordinator at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing, will join the rush on Jan 27, Lunar New Year’s Eve. He will take a train from Beijing to Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang province in Northeast China, reputedly the coldest city in the country.
A friend of the 27-year-old reserved the tickets for him online. “All I needed to provide was my passport number and date of birth,” the United States national said. However, unlike Chinese citizens, who can collect reserved tickets from machines at stations, Lehmann will have to collect his tickets from a booking window.
Having lived in China for nearly three years, mainly in Yunnan province and Beijing, he hasof traveling by train during the Spring Festival rush, taking various types of trains, from the high-speed network to slowly swaying rural services.
Last year, Lehmann traveled by train from Yunnan province in the southwest to Shaanxi province in the north of the country. During his trip, Lehmann visited friends in a number of cities, including Kunming in Yunnan, Chengdu in Sichuan province, and Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi province, so he has plenty of experience of China’s annual migration.
“I like to take trains — it’s relaxed and less expensive,” he said.
Last year, he booked the tickets himself via a mobile app, but the huge volume of traffic on the app presented many difficulties.
“You can see that tickets are available, but it takes time for you to get to the relevant page and when you get there, they may have already gone,” he said, adding that another inconvenience is that passengers are not allowed to choose their seats or bunk beds.
Lehmann advised travelers to choose less-popular destinations at peak times and always be prepared to be flexible with travel plans. “During chunyun (Spring Festival), your travel plans should be based on the rail schedule,” he said.
The help (with buying train tickets) I received has been a blessing Yuan Zhicheng, 40-year-old construction worker in Tianjin