OK so now I have a bit of spare time on my hands waiting for a train I'll give a quick update on my travels in China particularly the part I missed out. As a side note it seems to be a variably non-existent to very major problem for me to get online in China. The problem is lack of a Chinese ID card - which to me is not surprising since I'm not exactly a local, but they don't seem to get. This time I have managed to convince an internet cafe person to let me use a PC even though I don't have a Chinese ID card. Technically they need to swipe your ID card (Chinese only, of course, passport, what's that?) to allow any access - as you proabably know internet access is tightly controlled in China - if you rely on internet cafes for access it's even tighter.
Anyway with that venting out of the way, I arrived in China on April 23 from Malaysia. After 3 weeks of hostels, bunks, shared bathrooms and short hops on budget airlines it was a pleasant if brief change to be called "Mr Henley" and be offered champagne upon boarding for my 3 hr flight to HK. Why, you may be asking yourself? Well I had some miles left with Cathay Pacific so I got myself an essentially free trip from Malaysia to HK - business class. Arriving in HK late I quickly returned to my backpackerish ways and found the cheapest accommodation I could (at the infamous Chungking Mansions on Nathan Road - it's a bit of a landmark and very very dodgy, but by HK standards cheap. Here's the Wikipedia link if you're interested http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chungking_Mansions - the part about it being a fire trap and a guy being killed is true, but they're working on improving the facade of the building, so that should fix the fire egress problems right? Not! Anyway I've lived to tell the tale) My stay in HK was brief - only a night and a day. I had lunch with one of my ex-suppliers William followed by probably the smoothest border crossing of all my China travels into Shenzhen - China proper. The problem was once I got there finding the damned hostel I'd booked which I did finally after an hour of walking - it should have taken 10 minutes!!
Shenzhen was only a transit point for me and I did nothing and saw nothing there - I have been there dozens of times before so I wanted to keep moving. I went to the train station and bought a ticket for my first experience of long distance train travel in China - which was to be a good one. I started out middle of the pack as far as Chinese trains go with a hard sleeper berth on a K-train - they're newer trains and kept clean and tidy, but not particularly fast. The hard sleeper carriages consist of 6-berth modules - pairs of 3-high bunks facing each other with a space between and a table for the lowest bunks. K636 was a reasonably pleasant overnighter into Fujian province and I slept most of the night. The only problems I had were that the sleeper beds arent very wide (surprisingly the length is OK) and the headroom on the top bunk is not enough to sit up. All in all not a bad intro to trains in China - it will get a whole lot worse!!
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