We were heading to Beijing during a national holiday called Golden week and everything we'd read about this holiday said as a non Chinese tourist avoid China during this week if possible. Well not only were we in China we were heading to Beijing where the normal population is about 19 million so god only knows how many tourists would add to this figure. We exited the train station and were immediately hit by a wall of people who were obviously waiting for peopl...

We arrived in Datong in the afternoon and it was absolutely freezing, it was really dark and the rain was torrential so navigating our way over wet slippy tiles in flip flops with our backpacks on was an experience we don't want to repeat. Datong wasn't really what we were expecting, in some areas it was quite run down and finding somewhere to eat was really difficult, normally every other shop is a restaurant of some sort but they were few and far between here ...

We've had to dedicate another blog to a train journey so we could do it justice, here it comes..... So generally I'm not a queuer, I always think if you have an allocated seat there's no need so I'll be the last person on the plane/bus etc that is unless I'm in China in which case I've turned into one of "them people"! It's so busy here that I massively have the fear of missing the train, going to the wrong station, being in the wrong queue etc so I've been maki...

After our last 25 hour train journey on a hard seat we were heading to Xian on a 16.5 hour train journey with a hard bed, this one was going to be a breeze! We boarded the train to find out we were in different cubby holes, I'd ended up on a middle bunk and Casson was on the top bunk of 3 next door. He ended up asking a woman to swap with me so we could be in the same bunk area. She jumped at the chance and why wouldn't she? She got the middle bunk and I ended u...

Our next stop was going to be Chengdu but there was just a small matter of a 25.5 hour train journey to survive first. In China you have the high speed trains and then you have the slower than a snail trains. On the slow trains there are 4 classes, a soft sleeper where you're in a private cabin with 4 bunks, a hard sleeper where you're in a cubby hole with 6 bunks but no door so it's all open plan, a hard seat where there are 3 chairs, a table and then 3 chairs f...