The Sleeper Bus in Ch*na

Sometimes, you get stuck in a situation with strangers, and you can’t help but wonder what wrong have you done to suffer such an insufferable fate. It happened to me last Friday.

Took a sleeper bus from Shanghai to Xuzhou. We were the last ones to board the bus with all passengers not in place according to the beds assigned to them. We were crammed at the back of the upper deck. We did not even have enough time to recover from the horror of being in a stinky and stuffy bus before we began the nightmarish 7.5 hours journey. Dear friends, avoid the sleeper bus at all costs. We would have done it if we could, too bad the train tickets were all sold out by the time we finalized our traveling plans.

The sleeper bus consists of about 24 small beds, up and bottom deck. Passengers have to remove their shoes right after they board the bus. This explains why the whole bus stank, seriously stank. Minutes after the bus leaves the station, it stops somewhere to pick up more passengers, passengers who did not buy the official bus tickets from the station. They each paid 20RMB less than us and were offered a stool in place of a bed. They had to sit along the crammed aisles for the whole journey. I figured we had close to 20 extra passengers on board.

This is an experience I never want to go through ever again. The buses we took to travel from Xuzhou to Yangzhou and Yangzhou to Shanghai are way better than the sleeper bus, much more comfortable and most importantly, they do not stink of smelly shoes and socks.
*Solemnly* I survived the 7.5 hour ordeal to tell this tale. Dear friends, be warned.