Train Ride 1: Beijing to Xi'an

On the evening of our 4th day we hopped on a train and left Beijing. Our destination - Xi'an. Xi'an is about 14 hours south west from Beijing by train. It is the captial of Shaanxi Province and is a culturally rich city. On the train we had hard sleeper berths. THat means there were six bunks in each berth. The bunks were stacked three high and our group had two berths in total. The bunks were pretty small- about 175cm long (just about my height) and half a meter wide. We could only sity right up without hitting our heads on the bottom bunk so those people sleeping in the middle or top bunks had to hang out on the bottom until they went to bed. I was on the bottom. I was pretty impressed with the train. It was clean and had people who were constantly walking up and down the train collecting the garbage from our garbage bin and refilling our hot water container. The toilets were squat toilets and I was lucky to have had experience with squat toilets on trains in Japan because some of the people I was travelling with had difficulties adjusting to squating in general, nevermind squating on a shaky, moving train.

Train travel is quite social and I really enjoyed it. We all hung out, chit chatted and shared our picnic dinners and breakfasts. Good times!

Unfortunately we didn't sleep very well because throughout the night the train stopped at other stations and people would get on and walk by our beds. As they did this they would bump into our feet that were hanging off the ends of our beds and some people who couldn't read the berth numbers in the dark actually tried to get in our beds with us in them. Argh!

Poor Vivian didn't even get a bed to sleep in as there was a mistake made with the reservation. She only had standing room for half the trip and finally a seat for the final leg.

After 14 hours we arrived in Xi'an ready to continue our China adventure!