I checked out and was given back far more money than I’d expected from my deposit, which meant the room had cost me little more than a hostel. I headed across to the train station and found that the train to Changsha wasn’t until the late afternoon, so I headed across the road to grab an early lunch. I was given a table for four to myself and was quickly joined by a couple as the restaurant filled up. The guy was in his mid 20’s and immediately started practising his English on me. Though the conversation didn’t start promisingly, he admitted he hadn’t used English in 4 years, he soon got in his stride. He told me he was in the army working as an engineer and that he was on leave but had been called back early, meaning a rare holiday with his girlfriend was being curtailed. We were getting on great guns when he felled me with a veritable minefield of a question, ‘What do you think of the Chinese army?’. I spluttered an answer along the lines of admiring how big it was and immediately changed the subject. Lord knows what his reaction would have been if I mentioned my opposition to the Chinese policies over Tibet, the Falun Gong and various other disgusting human rights abuses. He insisted on paying my lunch bill and I still had time to kill so we headed on to a tea house and I bought us all a pot of relatively expensive Jasmine tea. We had a great chat and I only realised how close I’d left it to head for the train when I discovered an empty waiting room in the station and had to run to the platform to get on board. My new friends waved me off, my soldier friend’s girlfriend having uttered barely a word all afternoon.

Five hours later we pulled in to Changsha, the nearest city to the birthplace of Chairman Mao. I headed to the first hotel on the list of Lonely Planet (there weren’t any listings for hostels in Changsha in the Lonely Planet or online) but found it was fully booked. This was unexpected. Everything I’d read about Changsha suggested it wasn’t anywhere near as popular a destination as it had been in Mao’s heyday and that hotels were rarely even half full. The trend continued in the next two hotels and I was beginning to panic, it was now after 10 at night and I had nowhere to sleep. In the fourth hotel a friendly Chinese chap who called himself ’Ali’ befriended me and made it his mission to find me a room. We rang round a load more hotels but there was no room at the inn. The lad explained to me that there was a trade fair in town that’d filled it to its seams and he didn’t know anywhere else to try. He had, however, a solution. He was, despite only being 21, the second in command at his Mum’s company and knew of a spare bed sharing a room with one of his employees. Though the solution was unorthodox I had very little else to try and so followed my new chum up a dingy set of stairs in a run down hotel. We entered a room with 4 older guys playing cards and a small mound of money on the table. The air was thick with smoke and these guys were considerably less trustworthy than Ali but I’d come this far so decided to stay.

After a half hour of being gawped at and discussed by the workers the card game broke up and a burly fellow with a moustache started to question me. His first three questions addressed how much my trip had cost me, whether I owned a house in England and what my salary was. I dodged the questions as best I could and when he insisted on an answer to the third I remembered what I’d been told about the average earnings in China and plumped for just above that. He seemed satisfied and I was relieved to see him leave, my bedfellow was to be a slim, quiet guy in spectacles. I bid farewell to Ali who promised to come round first thing in the morning and as my roommate prepared for bed in the bathroom I formed a foetal position around my most precious belongings and attempted to sleep. I have to confess, it took me a while to relax as I pondered the ludicrous situation I’d got myself into!