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.
