Travelling day, travelling day! Woke up from scant amount of sleep after our late night banter and one, final MacDonald's trip to get ready for the train. We had to be up and ready for 7:30 to catch the bus which would take us to the train station. After a couple of goodbyes and a couple of no shows (Pete and Henry I am calling you out!!!) we boarded the bus, I fell asleep for the journey although I was told later that Beth fell off her chair while trying to catch 40 winks J. We arrived at the train station and faced a bit of a hike to make it to the entrance, because of the absurd age of my suitcase (it is wheeled not from the top but from a corner making it impossible to carry for 100m consecutively) Rob (such a gent!) offered to carry it for me and I got to carry the infinitely lighter goodies bag, filled with Chinese sweets and crisps.

We got to the station and we were filtered out by terminals into airport like gates. Unfortunately it meant that we were saying goodbye without even realising it to our friends travelling to Gansu and Xinjiang. So, we were whittled down to the 8 Jiangxi volunteers in our terminal. We occasionally spotted other Europeans, but as we decamped onto the tile floor it became quite clear that we were a bit of a novelty and so we got many looks and stares. Dan, like the good soldier he is, whipped out his guitar and we got stuck in. Alicia appeared about half an hour later having seen off our friends and invited us over the VIP terminal (you pay 50p and you get taken to a far less crowded terminal and let onto the train earlier, trust me it's worth in, it's a bloodbath trying to get on the train) another MacDonald's and some dodgy Chinese loos later and we were running for the train. 6 of us were in the same carriage.

Chinese hard sleeper train carriages are essentially like large moving dormitories. Each carriage has berths of 6 seats, 3 on each side, separated from other berths by partial walls, this makes the whole process of living generally very open. Our train was at 12 so we had hours before we needed to bed down and get some rest so we messed about chatting. There were two students in Dan, Matt and Ned's berth who were going back to university in Nanchang who we got talking with in broken Chinese, a boy and a girl, a medical student and a history student. We tried playing cards, the first game was theirs and they tried to explain it to us, however, it seemed like cards were going down for random reasons for which we couldn't fathom so they taught us a much easier Chinese version of chase the ace. We then taught them how to play cheat, after which Dan played guitar and we chatted about music. Later that evening we fell asleep, getting the best night's sleep of the journey so far.