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We were travelling to Sanya by bus only because there were no trains available for three days either side of tour planned date of arrival. At first the six of us were very excited to see that not only was our bus bright pink and plastered with a huge portrait of Mao, but that it was a sleeper bus. 'Beds!' we thought. 'We can sleep on the journey!' we thought. At least, that's what we thought for about twenty seconds until we'd actually got a proper look at the inside of the bus and what were passing for beds in there. The bus was of the same dimensions as any normal bus, but instead of two aisles of seats there were three aisles of beds. If you're thinking that sounds like a bit of a squeeze, you'd be right. I had to edge sideways to fit down the aisle between the beds and the beds themselves were so narrow that if we lay on our backs, our arms wouldn't fit by our sides. The length of the beds was also something of an issue, as there were ten fitted end-to-end along each aisle and the bus really was not long enough to cope with this. At a guess, I'd say the beds were maybe 5'5 long, and that's with a little shelf at the end taking up nearly a foot.
I passed the first eight hours of the bus journey cramped up in a near-foetal position on my bed, pretending to sleep/playing on my gameboy/watching Forrest Gump on my laptop. At midnight, just as I decided I was probably tired enough to try and sleep properly, our bus stopped and we were all emptied out into a ferry terminal. Most people had only just fallen asleep, so we staggered into the waiting room and sat down groggily to moan about the journey so far. At this point, an awkward young Chinese man comes over to introduce himself and ask if he can sit with us: "you all look so energetic!" We thought he was being sarcastic and burst out laughing; he wasn't joking and was completely baffled. Anyway, Harry Farudy, as he introduced himself, was delighted to meet us all and very excited to begin quizzing us about our lives. He was even more excited to learn that everyone was a student at either Oxford, Cambridge or Harvard, that we all spoke about a bazillion obscure European languages fluently and that Alice was a professional French horn player. When it finally came time to board the ferry, we did our best to lose Harry in the crowd - it was 1am and none of us had the energy or patience to keep up with his questions - but he ran to catch up with us and chose a seat right next to us on the ferry, from which he spent the next few hours staring silently across at us as we tried to sleep. Tried is the operative word here: the little metal chairs we were sat on weren't the most comfortable, the lights had been turned right up, there was a very loud, very bad, old film playing at the front of the room and several babies taking it in turns to scream. In all the four hours we spent on that bus, I don't think any of us slept for more than maybe 10 minutes. Not fun!
The good news was that by the time our ferry arrived and we piled back onto our bus (which we only found by following a friendly woman Mary recognised from the earlier part of the journey), I was so tired that I fell asleep within seconds and didn't wake up until we arrived in Sanya several hours later. And then we were in Sanya!
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