Hard seat for a hard sleep
Saturday, October 16, 1999
Saturday 16th October 1999
So we’re all travelling together to Chengdu and we have seats next to each other, but that surely is irrelevant as we’ll upgrade to a hard sleeper, no? No. Why are they impossible to get? So Jenny, Vaughan (whose birthday it is), Sophie and I had 17+ hours on the ancient hard seat hell. This is nothing like anything I’ve experienced in China so far. It’s a very old train, dirty, spittoon all over the floor, smoky, and with depressing noisy passengers squeezed into every available seat and crevice. What a way to spend your birthday! At least Jenny had a spare book and an interesting one at that - ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ for to me read and while away the hours. It would have been truly intolerable otherwise. I can’t believe how packed this train was, you couldn’t even see the floor for people, they were literally everywhere.
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