The bus from Yuanyang was another interesting one, we prayed for a coach rather than the previous bumpy minibus and our prayer was answered. After ten minutes of bumping and hurtling down the steep mountainous roads at about 100mph we realised we may have been better seeing what happened without praying! Two girls were sick on the bus (a first from our backpacking experiences unless due to hangovers) one girl was sat next to me so I had seven hours of heated puke...

It was exciting both to leave for China and to be going on our first night train of the trip. We arrived at the train station and were sent walking over about seven sets of train tracks, there were hundreds of people crossing the tracks and it looked like a scene from a film with hundreds of escaping refugees. Our cabin was great, we had four beds in the small room, the other two were empty until 2am when two Vietnamese blokes woke us up with their loud voices an...