‘Passport Please!’

I doubt that I could point to a map and say exactly where on our journey back from the Russian Embassy our relief at having been able to hand in our visa applications turned back into finger nail chewing but, by the time we arrived at Guangzhou Nan Railway Station, we were definitely feeling nervous again.

It was a reflexive thing for me to reach for our passports when we arrived at the station. They lived in their own little pocket in my bag and they had been there for eight months…

How were we going to do this?

We didn’t have the form we’d been told to get, instead we had some flimsy pieces of paper with our names on, and what might or might not be be a Russian Embassy stamp, we couldn’t tell. Would any of the staff working at the train station ever have seen a passport receipt issued by the Russian Embassy? 

We did have one thing going in our favour, we had bought actual pieces of paper tickets while we still had passports, no-one really used those but they might be useful at some point.

We decided the best course of action was ‘direct’, to go in like we knew what we were doing and ‘everything was fine’. 

Trouble would find us if there was trouble to be found.

We went up the enormous escalator and over to the luggage security check area. Maybe they’d know where the ‘Public Security Bureau for issuing Letters of Openness’ was.

We didn’t need passports for this bit but we still felt nervous – like we had signs on our foreheads saying ‘foreign spy!’

We queued along with everyone else, only everyone else had identity documents. I felt naked without my passport.

Eight months ago it would have taken me a good fifteen minutes to find our passports…with plenty of ‘I’m sure I put them in this drawer’…’and ‘didn’t you put them away last Theo?’ Before I’d eventually find them in the same drawer I’d looked in first of all.

We made it through the luggage check – we hardly had any so it was unlikely to lead be a full ‘stop and search’ incident.

Just going through the familiar process helped settle us a little and we joined the queue for showing our passports.

We decided to get the photocopies out as props as we approached the desk. At least it showed we had had passports once…

We got to the front of the queue and I handed the man behind the desk my phone with the ‘our passports are at the Russian Embassy’ translation, and thrust our passport photocopies, train tickets and embassy receipts at him. He glanced at the phone and then took the first passport photocopy, typed the number into his console, nodded and Rosa was through…as simple as that!

No alarms, no pounding feet, no men with guns and dogs…nothing.

Maybe this happened all the time in Guangzhou. Maybe there were loads of foreign tourists wandering around with photocopies of their passports…or maybe we were in the system and that was all that mattered.

We walked into the station waiting area and a sudden loud noise had all the waiting passengers looking up, it had started to rain…really hard.

We had two hours to go until our train arrived. We could rest for a while before we needed to do anything else…

All we had needed was a photocopy of our passports – which was good because I dropped the receipts from the embassy when Rosa and I went for a walk to size up how to get on to the train… luckily for my heart rate I hadn’t noticed until we walked back exactly the same way five minutes later, and they were still lying on the floor! I must have dropped them when I’d pulled the photocopies out to get at our train tickets. I’d shown them to the ticket man to confirm this was the right place to get our train…it had been part of my cunning strategy to get him believing we were meant to be on the train before he saw us in the ticket queue. It had not been part of our cunning plan to have the ever present eagle eyed station cleaners put our Russian Embassy receipts in the bin.

Drama over before it began we turned our attention to lining up for the train. Best to be right at the front so that if they weren’t going to let us through they had a) the maximum amount of time to figure out what to do with us, and b) the irritation factor of the queue behind us meaning help would be sure to come quickly.

The announcement came that our train was boarding. We were second in line and nonchalantly we handed over the photocopies. We didn’t explain anything just stood there like this was perfectly normal. The man keyed in the numbers – yep we were in the system – off you go.

So easy!

If the checks they did on the train and at the exit n Guilin were like this we’d done it without needing anything more than a photocopy of our passport…I could have thrown the visa receipts away myself!

We had ‘standing tickets’ on the train, which irritatingly cost the same as tickets with a seat. China rail have come up with the bright idea to sell a number of standing tickets for most trains because they have figured out that there are always people who don’t get on the train for one reason or another. Anyone with a standing ticket can sit in any seat they find and the official looking after each carriage (that’s right each carriage has its own attendant) looks at their lists and helps you find a seat if you are struggling.

We decided it was better to stay together because of the lack of passports and so we spent quite a large portion of the journey sat on the floor outside a toilet…infinitely better than in a holding cell in a Chinese police station.

No-one asked us for our tickets or our passports at any point on the journey – the train was packed but this was the first time we’d been on a train and not had to show our passports. Clearly sitting on the floor outside the toilets put us in a whole other category of traveller…or we were lucky.

We walked off the train and down the stairs to the long exit corridor, we went straight up to the man on duty and gave him our photocopies – his face was so expressive we could see his thoughts fly across it.

‘What the bloody hell is this? Seriously? Oh well, if they got on the train and everyone else has said yes to this who am I to make a fuss about it’

He opened the gate and waved us through, fresh air had never felt so good.

We got back to CLI in time for a noodle supper. Tomorrow our time in Guilin would begin in earnest.

The only slightly disconcerting cloud on the otherwise sunny Chinese horizon was a decision we’d made sitting on the floor outside the toilet on the train.

I was going back to Guangzhou to collect our passports on my own.