China’s bullet train: what is it like to travel at 440 kilometers per hour and cross a continent in just 4 hours?

In Chinathe bullet train, pack. And this is the proof.

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When they thought about buying the dealership’s most modern SUV, they thought they would go far, but not that far. Cross the city of Lima but do not cross the borders of another continent. Park on some lonely beach in the north, but don’t disembark in the second most populated country in the world. It is April 29 at night and there in Peru, life has not yet been lived according to the clock: it is still the 28th. We are tomorrow. A Peruvian couple is about to board the Beijing, China Bullet Train (CRH), the most extensive high-speed system in the world, with more than 38,000 km of tracks. A cast iron hulk that is effectively projectile-shaped. “When they called me on the phone – explains businesswoman Mabel Anampa, a Peruvian accountant, a very kind lady – I didn’t believe it. I had won a trip to China!” That is, to the future.

It turns out that she bought a truck from the company Omoda & Jaecoo Perú a couple of months ago and in the first days of March she received a call on WhatsApp. Neither she nor her husband Juan Carlos Carrasco, this polite man who takes photos at the station to send to his children, smiling as if instead of a tourist he were a boy at his graduation, had paid too much attention to those small letters when they signed the contract. What nobody reads.

A quick confirmation at the management level forced them to uncork their joy: this family of accountants were the winners of a trip to China, the other side of the ocean: visit a humanoid robot factory, have dinner with the CEO of Chery International, discover what type of grilled meat will be served, one night, in one of the gastronomic markets most sought after by tourists in this city, Beijing, which smells of soy, fried food and oysters a hundred times more than on Capón Street.

I think about them, and their luck, while reviewing the enigmatic videos on the cell phone film recorded in this country, China, which includes two galactic trips: Beijing-Wuhu and Shanghai-Beijing by Bullet Train. Sometimes destiny is that glamorous.

Life on a trip is no longer counted in tickets -those old people’s souvenirs- but in QRs. The first time I traveled outside the country, in 2005, I received some collectible cards whose main function, like hocus pocus, was to open doors to counters, departure lounges, and a Boeing. Now, 20 years later, any continental trip needs to comply with a ceremony whose first step is to have downloaded to your cell phone all the QR links for tickets, tickets and tours that allow a more friendly, practical and ecological life: every year 4,000 million trees in the world are cut down to make paper. It does not allow discussion.

The ticket I have to take the Shanghai-Beijing section costs more or less 550 yuan, that is, 270 soles, that is, almost 80 dollars. There are also wagons with prices starting at $20. In this one in which I am going, and I will travel 1,318 kilometers in four hours, I will have a reclining chair, a Wi-Fi signal, police security and a much more cosmopolitan snack than I expected: pasta with bolognese sauce and a bottle of water whose label shows off the bullet train locomotive, a decal that seems taken from one of the autobots. I brought the sticker.

Like entering a museum in Moscow or deciphering the Egyptian manuscripts, on China’s Bullet Train a first shock appears as soon as the suitcases are packed: reading the language without prior preparation is impossible, so the QR code is a universal language. Chinese is the most spoken language in the world, with more than one billion users, but it is a complex alphabet that is difficult to decipher.

But on this particular trip there is an advantage: we are at the Beijing 2026 Autoshow, in the easy reading of specialized journalists, “the most influential motorsports event in the world.” Here, 181 premieres will be presented among the 1,451 automobiles on display, in addition to 71 futuristic ideas about how pedestrians who are too lazy to drive a car will get around. Beijing suffers an unusual invasion of such different nationalities that, these days, it becomes a kind of Babel with driverless vans that park themselves and 24-hour storms that do not leave floods in the streets. The 13 average carriages that a Bullet Train has in China are packed with fans of speed and irons who, however, are surprised how this machine reaches 440 kilometers per hour and not a drop falls from the glass of water, the suitcases that we have arranged like Lego pieces are not disturbed. Nor how the agricultural fields pass by the window without brakes and not a hair moves.

Line G of this train – a Chinese conception that dates back to the 90s*, that is, when Peru was filled with minibuses – is the ideal transportation for these crowds.

With the QR on the cell phone – the only thing that can be read in Spanish is that I am in car 12, seat 4D -, only the experience comes: crossing 1,318 kilometers and more than 500 cities on the sides in four hours forces me to understand my smallness. In China, this railway line seems on track to beat any commercial flight, which it has made seem slow and unprofitable: a direct trip between Beijing and Shanghai takes approximately 2 hours and 15 minutes, not counting previous transfers, taxis, and delays.

Then it is impossible not to Google: there are 3 hours of travel left: in 2003 the first high-speed line designed for 250 km/h was inaugurated, in 2008 this was the formal transport for the Olympic Games. In 2035, China predicts the opening of the first trip of its underwater bullet train, which will travel at more than 250 km/h, linking two cities in minutes. The so-called Bohai Strait Tunnel plans to link the Liaodong and Shandong peninsulas and will cost about 36 billion dollars.

How to fulfill the mission of knowing the Great Wall of China, for this pending there are 10 years of savings left, buy the ticket, prepare the light carry on and return.