Night train from Pingyao to Xi'an - 10th to 11th July

Our guide, Leon, had warned us that this was the worst train journey we would be taking. No air conditioning, noisy and possibly dirty as we were joining the train half way through it's total trip.

Pingyao station was very quiet and easy to negotiate compared to Beijing, so we were soon in bunk bay 19/20 of carriage 7 - Dominic on top, Eva on the bottom and me in the middle this time.

We were pleasantly surprised to find fresh(ish) bedding on our bunks and a ceiling fan to help circulate the warm air coming in through all of the open windows. We had a lovely elderly Chinese granny in our bunk bay and surprisingly, without a common language, we managed to get some sort of conversation going. She was also travelling to Xi'an.

Even with the curtains flapping wildly through the open windows and the old train clanking and banging away we managed to sleep. Then we were woken up at 0600 because the train was arriving in Xi'an 25 minutes early!



We stepped off the train into a fast moving river of people and got swept out of the station into a churning sea of people. what were all of these people doing at this time of the morning? At least we had made it, knackered but still smiling. Dominic and I had both picked up some sort of cold/flu bug on that train - hope it wasn't bird flu or SARS!