it was a dirty train, you just felt grimy looking at the thing, I think we had been spoiled by the proudest of the staff on the Trans-Mongolian, this lot just sort of yell at you in Chinese and your not entirely sure whether their shouting at you or just asking you something. They also have a bizarre method of ticketing, you have to give them your ticket then they give you a plastic credit card type thing back, then in the morning you swap them back and you have to have your ticket to leave the station, I could understand it if you were in first class or something but it just seemed a bit pointless?! God this seemed like the longest train journey I had been on, it seemed well longer than our epic 51 hours, the time went so slowly, these trains are not half as sociable as the Russian trains, no-body plays games, there is just a stream of people walking up and down trying to sell you things, anything from water to dvd players, and yeah the dvd players are on and the volume is turned up to as loud as the

thing will go - well hectic! Time was slowly ticking by and Rob was getting in-grossed into the Nepal book we had managed to buy in Beijing, Greg (our tour leader) had put a movie on his laptop so I thought it was time for me to retreat and loose myself in my ipod and a book!

After the longest train journey in helly’s history finally drew to a close, I was extremely relieved to exit the train, from here we were transferred to our cruise boat on the Yangtse.

xhx

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