Train travel in China is always exciting but Chinese high speed train is even more scintillating! With an influx of new routes, super clean, and might fast trains, the age of smoky, shaking Chinese carriages are fading out. In the last 18 months On my first high speed train in China, I took a rare route, the Shenzhen North to Shaoguan route, which was my first experience of the new high speed trains in China. The trip presented an opportunity to see the mountains and rock formations at Danxiashan.
How to book your train in China
Don’t book anything in advance. Since traveling in China is always complicated, why makes things more complicated by possibly booking the wrong ticket online? If you’re out of luck and your train happens to be full, you can jump on the next one, or find an alternative route. Remember this is China, so the possibilities are endless.
You will likely have trouble communicating to the workers in the train station, so make sure you know how to correctly pronounce the name of your destination and if you have the Chinese characters written down (or in a guidebook) it will be a lot easier to get your trip booked. All seats are allocated and you have to sit where your ticket tells you to sit – in other words, it’s not open seating.
Above is the queue at the Shenzhen North Station and once you board the train, it leaves within minutes, making Shenzhen disappear in a flash. We reached a speed of 306 kilometres per hour on this part of the journey.
Arrival at Shaoguan Station (below). Shaoguan is not the last station on this high speed train which heads further north. It wasn’t just the train I took that reaches such astronomical speeds – most high speed trains in China reach over 300 kilometres per hour.
On a train from Shenzhen to Yongding:
Jonny Blair is a self confessed traveling nomad who founded and blogs at Don’t Stop Living. He sees every day as an adventure. Since leaving behind his home town of Bangor in Northern Ireland ten years ago he has traveled to all seven continents, working his way through various jobs and funding it all with hard work and an appetite for travel. Don’t Stop Living, a lifestyle of travel’ contains over 1,000 stories and tips from his journeys round the globe. He wants to show others how easy it is to travel the world, give them some ideas and encourage them to do the same but most of all he aims to constantly live a lifestyle of travel. He is currently based in Hong Kong and on Twitter @jonnyblair.
