Passengers rushing home for the coming Spring Festival, or the Chinese Lunar New Year, are seen stranded out of Guangzhou railway station in Guangzhou,south China's Guangdong Province, Feb. 2, 2016.Some 50,000 passengers were detained in the railway station due to delays of trains caused by continous bad weather. (Photo: Xinhua/Liu Dawei)
Xu Shan abandoned her plans to fly home for the Chinese Lunar New Year after two weeks of deliberation.
It will be her third New Year holiday spent alone, 1,970 miles away from home.
"It's not that I don't miss my parents, but the long journey home is far too tiring and costly," said Xu, a white-collar worker at a training company in Fuzhou, capital of east China's Fujian Province.
To travel back to her hometown in Daqing, an oil rich city in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, she will have to get up at 5 a.m. to catch a flight to Beijing for a two hour stopover before flying on to Daqing.
It will be dark when she arrives at the bus terminal in Daqing and the last bus to her home county 50 miles away will have long left.
If she does not want to stay in a hotel, she will have to wait for a cab in freezing minus 30 degree Celsius temperatures and get home around midnight, too exhausted to utter a word of greeting.
"It's even more discouraging to think that I'll have to repeat the schedule in six days at most, because I will be back to work on the seventh day of the lunar new year."
Xu secretly planned to postpone her homecoming trip to March, when plane tickets are cheaper, but she is not certain whether her boss will grant her leave when everyone else in the company is busy.
The massive getaway for the Chinese New Year, a period that lasts around 40 days before and after the holiday, is a big event for everyone in the country. This year, the Chinese are expected to make 2.91 billion passenger trips across the country.
China has the world's largest railway network, with 19,000 km of high-speed railways in operation by the end of last year, but traveling is still a struggle for many.
Wang Yatong, a 26-year-old power station employee in Fujian's Nanping city, has chosen to stay at work during the Chinese New Year. He said it would be "a waste of time" to travel home to Pingdingshan in central China's Henan Province.
His journey home would consist an eight-hour train ride plus two bumpy, congested trips on long-distance buses.
