Day 30 - An anxious wait for the train to Kunming

With nothing on our agenda until the train to Kunming (the capital of Yunnan) at 7.30pm tonight, we woke (no alarm, yay!) and headed for breakfast. Today there were much less people in the restaurant which meant less stares and a more enjoyable breakfast - the aim of the game was to eat as much as possible to fill us up for as long as possible!!

We relaxed and packed in our hotel room and read up on the Lonely Planet Bible about Kunming and beyond, before checking out and heading to the nearest internet cafe to update our blog - which has been proving very difficult. After posting the first catch-up day, we were blocked from posting more - hopefully Kunming will prove more successful.

With all our gear beside us (and not on our back) it was nice spending 5 hours catching up on emails and writing our blogs in email to hopefully post tomorrow with photos.

We decided to fill ourselves up before the long train trip so found a nice looking streetside 'restaurant' - we judge nice by smiles from the workers, the cleanliness (not New Zealand 'clean'), and the number of diners inside. After asserting "We don't eat meat", Liv proceeded to order a pork dish (she meant to order potatoes but her pronounciation must have been well off!). Luckily we also ordered 2 other, vegetarian, dishes - we ended up paying $3.50 for another great Chinese meal. Going to restaurants with English menus certainly is easier but you end up paying foreigners' prices (usually around the $10 mark!), and the food tends to be a more western version of Chinese.

After being down on Guizhou, we enjoyed ourselves at lunch/dinner - the people were lovely and we had other patrons smiling and trying to help us order even though they didn't speak a word of English either! The men over here love seing Adam with his huge pack on (as well as both our day bags clipped to his front) and constantly give him the thumbs up! Liv feels bad giving Adam all the weight, but loves having an extremely light pack!

We had a nervous wait for the train - this is our first long distance train and while we're used to the bus, where there are only 40 people going on our bus, there are hundreds waiting with us for this train and things are very unfamiliar! It is esimated that there are 10 million Chinese on trains at any one time in China - crazy!! We were crammed in amongst the masses and completely lost (and looking it) a friendly station attendant took us to where we needed to be, actually he took us to the front of the line and moved peoples' bags to provide us with seats!

It wasn't long until we were charging with everyone else to our carrige, we were pleasantly surprised at where we would be spending the next 12 hours - we thought it might be longer so 12 hours was a nice surprise!

We needn't have worried about our seats being apart as the Chinese man sitting next to Liv was more than happy to swap with Adam, even though Adam communicated completely in English. The seats were in groups of 4 and we were lucky to have 2 nice Chinese men sitting across from us - we called them "Blue Shirt" and "Yellow Top" and managed to pass a lot of time by playing cards with them, much to the amusement of the entire carrige who soon swarmed around to watch (and take photos)! We managed to communicate the rules, which proved to be half the fun - no one on our carrige spoke English (we were the only foreigners on the train). Mr Blue Shirt turned out to be hugely competitve and loved picking on Adam in 'Last card", while Mr Yellow Top struggled - mainly because Mr Blue Shirt kept looking at his cards to tell him what to play to enable him to pick on Adam more!

A very amusing part of the trip was when we were being talked about in Chinese and Liv turned to Adam and repeated (in Chinese) what had been said - a wave of "the girl speaks Chinese" spread through the carriage and words of warning issued when new people arrived and began to talk about us. Unfortunately they slowly clicked onto Liv's level of Chinese - but it was fun for a while! While Liv tried to speak in Chinese, the passengers (and most other Chinese we meet) just laughed at Adam's constant "ting bu dong" (I don't understand)!

The passengers got great joy from reading the phrasebook and trying out some English, and tried to read the lonely planet (impossible as it's in English). Having our 'lifelines' out of our possession was slightly stressful but we left with them so that's all that matters!

After no sleep (the lights were on all night and it was impossible to get comfy - we guess this explains the $10 tickets) we arrived in Kunming at 6.30am, which we have been waiting for for a long time!

Adlibing it through the night and into the next day, without sleep!