Mad travelling day 10th August

Dear All,

 

What a mad day Monday the 10th August was! I had to travel from Yangshou to Guilin to Beijing to Xi'an. A journey of several thousand miles involving planes, trains and automobiles. Luckily my plane departure from Guilin was fairly early in the day, as cars cannot get to the Li River Retreat (where I was staying) between 10am and 3pm due to the market blocking the road. So I left at 9am. The flight from Guilin to Beijing was uneventful but then I had to travel across Beijing to pick up the train tickets and then across the other side of Beijing to catch the sleeper train. I nearly went to the wrong train station, I had only spotted one main station (Beijing Central Station) but luckily on  confirming with the travel agent I was told that I needed to go to Beijing West Train Station. The train departed at 9.16pm. So at 8.30pm I was trying to flag down a taxi and explain I wanted to go to the west train station by using my phrase book. Can you believe it, the phrase book doesn't have the phrase, "Please take me to the ...."?

 

Luckily it was a patient taxi driver and the penny dropped. It was like a film: the traffic was bad, the clock was ticking and all I needed was Keanu Reeves leaning over shouting "What do you do?"! Then I saw a sign saying West Train Station 1km, phew! Nearly there... However the driver decided he'd then take me on the long scenic route. I finally got out of the taxi with 15 minutes to spare but then had to run along the foot bridge only to find there was a massive queue at the entry to the station as they did security checks. So when in China do as the Chinese do - DON'T QUEUE, PUSH IN! So that's what I did: running and sweating with my case and rucksack down to the furthest platform, and to the last carriage of the longest train in the world. I finally got on to the train with 6 minutes to spare (3 mins before they shut the doors) so what was all the rush about?

 

The soft sleeper was really quite nice, I shared the room with a couple from Finland and they were friendly. The journey was 11 hours so it was good to do it at night as you don't need a hotel and you don't miss out on any valuable sightseeing time. The soft sleeper is the best, so I paid more for that I could have had a hard sleeper with more people in the room or just a seat with about 10 people sitting together. This was definitely the right choice, funny though I've never been on a train yet that has a nice toilet! 

 

Ally x