1st Day of the China trip

First Day 18th December 2007

Our flight to Shenzhen was at 6:50am. This was the earliest flight that I have ever taken. My brother sent my friend-Chee Ying and me to the airport. Once we reached Shenzhen, we went straight to the railway station to buy train tickets to Zhang Jia Jie. The taxi fare from the Shenzhen airport to the railway station was about RMB200 which I was felt was extremely expensive.

We quickly queued to buy the tickets based on the information that I had downloaded from the internet. The ticketing officer told us that there wasn't more berths for the transit train and asked us if we wanted to buy tickets for one seating and one standing as there was only one seat left. We agreed as it was only a 3-hours journey anyway. When we about to pay, we only found out that the journey wasn't 3 hours, it was 27 hours. We were shocked and felt lucky as we had found out earlier. Imagine standing or sitting in the train for 27 hours! This inciddent happened because the information in the internet only showed the departure and arrival times and it didn't show the duration. In China, the ticketing officer will not provide you any travel information. There was a "customer service" officer who just sat right in front of the entrance of the railway station. She wasn't friendly and we were scared to ask her more. After running up and down, we finally managed to get a railway schedule and arranged our routes accordingly. We bought tickets for the night train from Shenzhen to Changsa - the capital city of Hunan.

We went shopping at Lao Jie. The fesyenable clothes were cheap and stylish but all are winter clothes. I controlled myself not to buy any as this was just the first day of the trip. I needed to spend within my budget and considered the weight of my travel bag.

The train to Changsa was an old one where the facilities were bad. Every compartment had 6 berths and the there were 2 rows. We slept on the top berths and there weren't any railings to protect us from failing down and there were only 2 nylon trips holding the bed from the ceiling. The space was limited, we couldn't even sit or turn our bodies. After we went up to the bed, we didn't go down and go to the toilet untill we reached Changsa the next morning.