On a train, on a boat

I thought I talked about this earlier, but I was looking back on my blog, and I don't think I mentioned one piece of China craziness. 

Hainan is an island. We went to there. While we were planning our trip, we weren't sure if there were trains that went from the mainland to the island, or if we would have to take a ferry. We looked at google maps and saw this:

"Cool," I thought, "they built a bridge." And we didn't think anything of it again, since we bought train tickets from Guangzhou to Sanya (mainland to island) with no problems.

It was a sleeper train, so we settled down in our bunks and went to bed. 

About three o'clock in the morning, I was awakened by multiple ruckuses. There were of course the babies crying and people snoring, but the train itself was really loud, and kinda bumpy, even though we were stopped, almost like they were separating the cars. I looked out the window and we were unnaturally close to another car, but it being three o'clock in the morning, I wasn't really too concerned about what was going on. 

We arrived in beautiful Sanya at about six. While we were on a bus to find a hostel, we (myself, Matt and our friend Sam) started to talk about how we had all be woken up by the noise last night. We could not figure out what had been going on that could be so loud, or why we were stopped with cars on both sides of us. I don't know how we came about it, but we started to think that maybe they had put the train on a ferry.

"That's too crazy, even for China," we all agreed "Put a WHOLE train on a ferry and ship it across the bay? Thats insane."

When we arrived at our hostel, we got on google maps, remembering that we had seen a bridge. This time we switched it to satellite view, and this is what we saw:

No bridge. They totally put our train, car by car, onto a ferry, shipped us across the bay, connected us all together again and continued on their merry way. Who thinks of something like that? I'll tell you who, the same people who decided to build a railway on ICE into Tibet(seriously read the link, it's crazy talk). 

So, moral of the story is, I have been on a train, on a boat.