The Train Conductor

The next day (one hour later) we caught a train to Nice, to spend the day. There was a night train leaving that night to go to Florence, our next port of call. We wondered through Nice and found the beach.

The beach in Nice was a shingle affair. I don't know if it's just me, but that kind of thing shows a remarkable lack of effort. Went for a swim, but once you're in the sea it's extremely hard to get out again. The stones are amazingly painful to walk on, and they have a nasty habit of battering your feet when the waves draw back. You kind of end up crawling out of the water as stones smash against you, trying as hard as you can to look like you're not struggling and failing miserably in the process.

After a quick dip I was ready for a well earned sleep. Karim and Polly had wondered off for the day, and me and the others had no plans other than to stay on the beach. I put on some lotion - by now my sunburn was gone and I was actually brown - and kipped. Two hours later the others woke me up and told me to turn onto my back. An hour later they woke me to put me on my side. Bless them. Karim would have just cracked some eggs onto my chest and waited for them - and me - to fry.

Things were going well between the six of us. The Sangria "I Have Never" night had removed any of the tensions that might have been there, and we were all getting along swimmingly. Even the whole issue of Karim and Polly disappearing for a week had been cleared up and sorted out. Everyone was happy.

That night we got on the train - our first experience of the Italian train service. So far we'd found that the French trains were pretty good, and the Spanish ones were reasonable. First impressions of the Italian train were good - it was all carriages as opposed to rows of seats, so we had a carriage to ourselves. This was good.

After a few hours, the train started getting busier, and before long there were people sat out in the corridor. No problem. After midnight, the group started drifting off to sleep. Although I had only had four hours sleep that afternoon for the night before, I experienced some kind of second wind and decided to catch up on my diary. I had loads of time to sleep before we had to change in Pisa at four AM.

So it wasn't until about two in the morning that I decided to get some sleep. It wasn't the most comfortable situation to be in. With six people in the carriage, it was very hot indeed. And if you opened the window, it was ridiculously noisy. So some kind of balance had to be struck. This seemed to involve me opening the window every time the train slowed down and then closing it as it sped up.

Either way, I probably drifted off to sleep at about twenty past two.

At half past two, the light in our carriage was put on an the Italian Conductor shouted at us to show him our tickets. The story we had heard that they weren't allowed to wake up sleeping passengers was, it seemed, complete b******s.

We thrust our Interrail tickets at him with bleary eyes. He wasn't impressed. He began to shout even more in Italian.

"Do you speak English?" I asked.

"No", he said, then he carried on shouting in Italian.

"We don't speak Italian", I said.

He shouted in Italian some more.

"We can't understand what you're saying".

He started pointing at our tickets, and then at the sign on the door to our carriage.

"We're in the wrong place", Andy said, him being rather quicker on the uptake than I was. "This is first class, and he's saying our tickets only allow us second class".

"Wait", I said, looking around. "This is first class?"

"We're changing in like an hour and a half", Andy said to the guy. "Can't we just stay here? It's two in the morning, I don't think you're going to be swamped with first class customers".

The shouting, pointing and general energetic display made it clear that no, we couldn't.

So we had to drag our stuff through four carriages of cramped corridors, avoiding sleeping Italians, climbing over those that had camped down on the floor, and swearing at the conductor.

We did actually find a carriage in second class. Actually, we had two. And you know what? It was more bloody comfortable than first class had been. The chairs folded down to become beds.

b******.