Peter our tour guide collected us from our luxurious, clean, cheerful, 5-star hotel with our driver and took us to the railway station. We were telling him how impressed we were with Chinese trains as the station in Shanghai was amazing. He told us that a new station was being built in Chongqing but we were leaving from the old station. We had to pass through security and say farewell to Peter. At this stage all was going very well.

Once inside we found 100s of people waiting for the train. Each with loads of bags of food for the trip (instant noodles and packaged chicken feet and their hot tea cups). We had a small bag of food like this too, minus the chicken feet.



The only thing written in English were the numbers and we knew our train number, carriage and seat numbers. People were lining up at least an hour before departure. The signs indicated we should go through gates 2 and 3. Once the gates were opened, people started to run. At this stage we knew not where to and we thought we had plenty of time, so no hurry. We started to line up for gate 2 and after a few minutes of pushing we noticed the gate was changed to 5. We pushed our way across as we saw the exit gates on 2 and 3 were locked. I was pushier than Mick and got quite a bit ahead of him, but we eventually both made it through and found our carriage and berth. We were sharing it with two young men. The floor was wet and the seats / bed made up. Hot water is available in the carriage and there is one WC for us to share. I decided not to drink on this trip as we will be on this for ten hours. See if you can spot Mick with his hand up in this photo.



I kept one young man entertained. He thought I looked very funny and he even took photos of me, with and without my mask. Yes, I did wear a mask here. The first time and the main reason was the cigarette smoke. People could smoke in the station and I could smell it on the train. I later spotted a packet (my collective term for a group of smokers) of men crouching on their haunches between the carriages and puffing away with gay abandon. The young man in our carriage kept talking to his friend and laughing while looking at me. I was glad at that point I did not understand Chinese.

We passed through many long tunnels and the train would give heaving jerks every so often. This certainly kept us awake.



Railway staff wandered through the train offering food items and small plastic stools for sale. Mick and I think that some of the carriages do not have allocated seats, hence the mad race when the gates opened and we think the small plastic stools are for people to buy if they missed out on a seat. 

The sun tried hard to come out today. The countryside looked colourful with its small crops of canola interspersed with other crops.

We eventually arrived in Xi’an and hopped off the train with the 100s of others and made our way outside the station. As we were the only non-Asians, our guide spotted us easily. Thank goodness. It was then only a short walk to our car and driver who took us to our hotel where we could shower and wash our clothes to try to rid ourselves of the cigarette smoke smell.

I really hope Mick enjoyed this trip.