Welcome to China

As promised, here is an account of a long journey:

8am - Depart Monkey Island
9am - Arrive at Cat Ba island, get on bus to the other side of Cat Ba island
10.30am - Back on boat, make for Halong city
1pm - Arrive at Halong city, get on bus back to Hanoi
5pm - Arrive in Hanoi, eat, sort bags out for China, wait
9.20pm - Get on train from Hanoi to Nanning
2am - Arrive at Vietnamese border, get off train, leave Vietnam, wait around
3am - Arrive at China border, enter China, wait around, get back on train
11am - Arrive at Nanning, buy train tickets to Guilin*, wait around
3.10pm - Leave Nanning for Guilin
9pm - Arrive at Guilin

Savage - 37 hours of solid travelling. Guilin wasn't even our final destination, we spent the night here though and sat down for a well earned beer and meal before heading to Yangshuo the morning after. This was only a one hour bus though, no complaints.

*Maddy's journey differed at this point, her's went something like:

11am - Arrive at Nanning, buy train tickets for Guangzhou, wait around
5.20pm - Leave Nanning for Guangzhou
6.30am - Arrive at Guangzhou, buy train ticket to Shenzhen
7am - Leave Guangzhou for Shenzhen
8am - Arrive at Shenzhen
8.30am - Get to hotel, sleep

Even more savage - 48.5 hours of solid travelling.

(We had gone our separate ways for a few days because of us both wanting to do different things. I really wanted to see some of the country in the south and Maddy had some serious shopping to do without me slowing her down and moaning about being tired. She set off for Shenzhen and then Hong Kong, where I would catch her up a couple of days after she arrived.)

It gets worse - there are four types of train tickets that apply for most Chinese trains; Soft seat, hard seat, soft sleeper and hard sleeper. Essentially we will only really be looking at hard seats or hard sleepers. Our train to Nanning was a hard sleeper, which despite suggestions otherwise are really comfortable. Hard seats on the other hand aren't. All our overnight trains would ideally be hard sleepers because spending that long on a hard seat is something I wouldn't wish on anybody.

Both our onward trains from Nanning were hard seats - this was obviously much worse for Maddy than it was for me, due to her train being overnight and 6 hours longer. I was thinking on my train about how uncomfortable it was and how I would manage doing one overnight - sadly a few days later I found out. Apparently at any one moment there are ten million people on trains in China. They are crazy busy and the sleepers can book up days in advance. Unbeknown to us, our arrival in China coincided with the students all travelling home - demand was up higher than normal. At the time of writing we have both done two out of the three overnight trains we would have to take in China, one was hard seat and the other hard sleeper. Sadly our final train will also be a hard seat. Not cool. Benson has also done an overnight hard sleeper train that we're yet to hear an account of - and faces the prospect of a 36 hour train from the southwest of China up to the northeast, that's not for a while though so he should be okay for a sleeper.

Anyway, moaning about trains aside, China is incredible. I think we were all feeling a little bit drained towards the end of Vietnam. Despite Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam all being quite different, they are at the same time remarkably similar in alot of aspects. It was here that China was really refreshing, a new challenge for us all that I think gave us all a second wind.

Barely anyone speaks English here, and the western backpackers don't represent the money here either - that would be the wealthy Chinese tourists, so we've gone from being constantly hassled to ignored by touts, which is great! In Nanning especially (the least touristy place we've been in China) everybody was just staring at us. Lots of people would come up and ask to take a picture with us or just of us, for no other reason than us being westerners. Weird, but China has only been letting foreigners into the country for the past 15 years.

Lots of stuff is censored here too. You can't get on facebook, twitter, youtube or this website, which is ultimately the reason these updates have taken so long. We are now staying with a friend in Shanghai who has a proxy set up on her laptop, so this blog post is coming to you from Shanghai, via San Francisco!