Today is the big train journey which will take us half across the country to a very different landscape. Guilin is a very pretty place and the landscape is quite unique although if you have ever been to Halong Bay in Vietnam you will see a similarity.

The journey takes just over eight hours and is way better than flying because there is no real check in process. You just arrive 30 minutes before departure and find the gate to the platform. Our hotel is about a ten minute walk and we deliberately picked this area so that we could have an easy start to the day.

We got many supplies for the trip which consists of fruit, dumplings and crisp and even chocolate. We bought new flasks and so we can even have tea if we want. All in all it’s as good as it gets in peasant class, I guess the only real problem is the many Chinese that we are sitting that have no consideration for their fellow passengers. There are many announcements when we leave a station which no one seems to pay attention to, which is much the same as when we are waiting to fly. Things like be careful when you recline your seat, don’t talk too loud, keep your children under control, don’t play loud music but as I say many choose to ignore.

The train is sitting just over 300 kph and is very smooth and you would be hard pushed to find fault apart from of course having noisy passengers around us.

The sun was shining when we left Hangzhou but the rain soon set in as we began to travel west but I think that tomorrow should be fine and the rain will have hopefully moved on. I went to Guilin many years ago and it was also a bit damp and I remember that the pavements were really slippy when wet so we will all have to be very careful.

So for the moment we’re sitting here watching a misty landscape whiz by punctuated with cities farms and hills.