Editor's note:With roughly 3.62 billion passenger trips during the Spring Festival travel rush, starting Thursday, many are finding their own unique ways of getting home. The following are snippets of how some people are trying to avoid the migratory tidal wave in China.

Five college students from Hunan province have already begun their 400-kilometer trip home - on foot. The five are from Chenzhou, a city in the southeastern part of the province, and studying at Hunan Finance and Economic University in Changsha, the provincial capital.

To avoid the holiday rush, they gathered together a month ago to plan their routes home. They decided on which counties they would stop at for accommodation and supplies. They also created emergency plans.

The group's university encouraged their walk home by providing free jackets, biscuits and medicine.

In stages

Some passengers who were unable to buy a train ticket home figured out how to cut what would be a long train trip into a number of relatively short ones.

One man, surnamed Yu, missed out on buying a train ticket from Dongying, Shandong province, to Wuhan, Hubei province.

He will first take a bus from Dongying to Jinan, the capital of Shandong. Then he will decide on either a train or bus to Xuzhou, Jiangsu province, where he will again board a bus to Zhengzhou, Henan province.

His last ride will be on a train to Wuhan.

Carpooling

To some holiday travelers, carpooling is a more economical and comfortable option.

Recently, carpooling websites have received a lot of hits from travelers looking to hitch a ride together.

On these websites, typing in the starting and ending points will provide users with a list of people who are traveling the same route.

Car information, expenses and a travel plan are also provided.

Private aircraft

As China gradually opens its general aviation airspace, more and more affluent people are flying in their private aircraft.

One of the first to do so was businessman Zou Jianming, who traveled from Shanghai to Fujian in 2010 in his private helicopter. Once in Fujian, he used the aircraft to take his family members on trips in the area. His journeys cost 3 million yuan ($496,600) in total, Beijing Morning Post reported.

More people have taken the private-plane route in the years that followed, even hiring private jets.

chengyingqi@chinadaily.com.cn

Passengers watch a video on a train from Nanjing in East China's Jiangsu province to Chengdu in Southwest China's Sichuan province on Thursday. About 70 percent of the passengers on the train are migrant workers going home for Spring Festival. Han Yuqing / Xinhua