Day 54 - An adlibed travel to an unplanned destination

Waking up, neither of us could have guessed what the day would bring on our way to our destination: Nanchang in Jiangxi province! Our plans were to catch the bus to Huaihua, a town centured around a railway junction - this part of the plan was successful. While in Jishou, 2 days prior, we had checked that a train went directly from Huaihua to Nanchang - and were assured that it would. However, upon arrival in Huaihua we were promptly told by the ticket lady "mei you" - pretty much: there is no train! We slumped down on our packs and tried to reevaluate our options, eventually deciding to ask the police officer for help (instead of battling the seemingly endless ticket queue again). With a mighty show of helping the 'silly westerners', he whisked Liv off, right to the front of the queue, and ordered us tickets to Changsha. Changsha was not a destination we had planned on, but hoped we could get a bus or train to Nanchang from there - supposedly a train departed at 8pm, which was perfect considering our train was due to arrive at about 7.40pm.

Preparing for our ride, we set about checking what carriage and seat numbers we held - this was when we first discovered that we were about to embark on our first standing train trip - of about 6 hours. Excellent, just when it couldn't get worse. Despite having standing tickets, after about 45 minutes, we were offered 2 seats and sat in them for pretty much the whole way to Changsha - the men who gave them to us, refused to take them back, despite them having to sit on each others' knees for most of the journey! We ended up sitting across from a lovely old couple from 'Shangri-la', who we tried to converse with and they showered us with apples, peaches, watermelon and bottles of water - they were just another example of the friendly majority of China, who definitely go way out of their way to make us welcome. People like this more than make up for the small population who stare, laugh, and most annoyingly speak in double-speed talk just to laugh in Liv's face when she can't keep up.

Arriving in Changsha - the capital city of Hunan province - at 8pm we ran to the information desk to inquire after the Nanchang train and were told to quickly go to the ticket office. Thinking we were in luck, we bravely ordered two tickets to Nanchang - only to be asked: 4am tomorrow or 8pm tomorrow? After much deliberation we decided 4am it would be - why postpone the travels, we thought?

The first four hours were spent eating and on the internet, and the last four hours were spent in the loud, dirty, spit-covered trainstation waiting room - definitely not our most luxurious night, but the cheapest night so far - everything has a positive, right?! We had looked around to see if we could find a cheap hotel to stay in for the few hours we had in Changsha - but it only resulted in a circular trapse around town with our packs - in steaming hot Changsha.

Adlibing it through the night on the train-station floor.