Day 8

Saturday was the day we left Hong Kong for Shanghai.

We had some time to kill after checking out of the hostel, so went to an Irish pub nearby to get some breakfast and had the huge misfortune of being sat next to, quite possibly, the most miserable, chain-smoking, know-it-all Australian teacher on the planet, who proceded to spend the next two hours insulting just about every age, sex, race, sport, political viewpoint and religious group in existence. (For those of you that know how my mind works...yes, the idea of telling her that Daley was a mixed race, bisexual, white supremecist, Muslim, sports fanatic did cross my mind.) Anyway, never in my life have two hours gone so painfully slowly and I feel quite stupid admitting this now but there was a point at which I excused myself from the lecture, headed for the gents, selected the cleanest cubicle and just sat there.

Little did I know at the time but those ten minutes in self-imposed solitary confinement would have monumental consequences on the outcome of our day. To pass the time I had been idly flicking through my belongings and noticed that we were booked on a train bound for Beijing. [Insert generic Alan Partridge expression of joy here] We still had time to get the tickets changed and it gave us an excuse to get away from Mrs Bernard Manning.

The ticket office wasn't far from the pub and when we arrived the lady that issued our incorrect tickets had already arranged for replacements to be waiting for us at Hung Hom station, so we made our way over with plenty of time to spare and took our seats in the waiting lounge as the only westerners.

When Daley and I booked the tickets a few days ago, we had been asked, in broken English, if we wanted to go on "top or middle". Without hesitation we replied, and I quote, "top, because we will get a better view" and then began to speculate about how fancy these Chinese trains must be if they have three decks. Come the end of that discussion we had convinced ourselves that we would be travelling to Shanghai on some kind of Bullet train with panoramic views, wi-fi and fine dining. So naive. This is what we ended up with. There was a luggage compartment at the end of our beds and I had to kick everything over to Daley's side just to get enough leg room.

Still, the hours flew by, thanks mainly to Jeffrey Archer's latest masterpiece, A Prisoner of Birth, and we had no trouble negotiating the subway system or finding our hostel thanks to Billy, a Chinese hair stylist who was sharing our cabin.