Hard seat train to Datong - two hour wait, 6 hour trai with old men staring at us, very carmped (see photo). Sleeping was not very easy, the seat was ok for the first hour or so then we realised why they call it 'hard' seat - numb bumbs. Nice to see the man opposite us picking the ticks out of his arm. :-) Met a nice lady and everyone helped us learn our 1 to 10 - lots of laughs and incomprehension on our part - but it was all good humoured. It did stink and everyone smoked - which in retrospect probably helped with the smell. The lady might have offered us a place to stay and show us round but we could have been mistaken - we lost her outside the train station so we'll never know. We shoud have just stuck with her and seen what happened.

We went to the hotel that we had previously booked - reminiscent of The Shining, emily thought. The room had bugs in it we found after our inspection and the view of the bottle recycling plant was really nice. I won't forget that aroma of burning glass and soot in the morning.

Next mission was getting some train tickets out of this place...after finding the right queue and getting to the front of it. I say queue but it was more of a cattle grid with a 2m wide rotating carosel at the counter to stop people from leaning round you to get served - genius. Managed to ask for the right tickets, to the right place but we got the old 'no tickets' reply. 'so when can we get a train out of here?' no tickets! 'when is the next train anywhere?' no tickets! ok...er...what now? this is the kind of place you find yourself desperately trying to get out of! We eventually found an english speaking ticket office which sorted out our trains for the next two journeys - he could have sorted out all our transport and accommodation for the next three weeks if we'd asked...the guy was a legend.

Spent a couple of hours uploading photos in a smokey internet cafe - there were about 200 hundred pc's in there - all gamers chuffing away playing world of warcraft or medal of honour. We left when our eyes could burn no longer.

Back to the hotel for more nooldes and I finshed off the sweet red wine - em drank the mini bottle of stolen carbinet sauvingon - life saver.

Breakfast was as expected - flavourless dumplings in watery soup with dodgy looking boiled eggs and pickled veg. Spicy bean sprouts were good. Nice view overlooking the Soviet-inspired square.

Blah blah blah..does anyone really want to know all this? :-)

Em's gone off chatting to some ausy bloke - I feel like I'm writing this thing by myself. I've got some that i wrote yesterday when it was raining - I'm just going to type that out - will fill you in on our trip to the caves and our walk round Datong later on - it's thrilling.