My first big trip - outwardjourney

When I first came to Jiangkou, one of my WeChat friends visited me.  She came all the way from Guangdong.  Lets just say its a long way!  I decided that in Spring Break that I was going to return the visit.  It will be my first big trip alone!  Quite daunting really!  Booking is fairly easy, because a friend recommended Trip.com app.  Fortunately it is all in English.  Unfortunately, I have had to leave my booking until quite late due to the fact that I had my appendix out.  I wanted to make sure all was well before I parted with my money.  The late booking means tht the prices are higher, and the availability is less.  In fact it was about 30% more expensive than I had planned and a there was not a lot of choice!  So the itinerary goes like this:

1. Taxi from Jiangkou to Tongren South Station and pick up my tickets
2. Tongren South Station to Guyyang Station by train
3. Underground, shuttle bus or taxi to Guiyang Longdongbao Airport
4. Guyiang Longdongbao airport to Hangzhou airport by plane
5. Hangzhou airport to Hangzhou East station hoping to get the high speed train here
6. Hangzhou East station to Zhongshan.

The last part of the journey will be on a sleeper train.  Just a standard sleeper as all the de-luxe sleepers were gone!  It will be an eleven hour journey, and chances are I will be the only foreigner on the train!  I have seen these trains before, but never been on one.  I reckon it could be a very interesting journey!  Just as an addendum, the temperature here in Jiangkou is about 4 degrees.  In Guangdong it will be 25 degrees!  What to pack!  Oh and it just got more complicated!  I had asked a friend to book me a taxi for tomorrow, you need to be able to speak Chinese well to do that, and she tried but said it was too early to be  one as there would be no passengers to fill the rest of the taxi seats!  "Come over to Tongren now, I am with Taylor, another of my friends, we will have a party.  You can sleep at hers!  Yikes! Taylor had offered before and I planned to go and see her and her partner ....but this was a surprise!  Here we go!  I'm off to pack my bags!  The car arrived shortly afterwards and I was off to Tongren.  It took maybe an hour and when I got out of the taxi, I gave Taylor a call. She came down and took me to hers.  A nice apartment on the sixth floor.  No lifts.  I sat down and chatted with her for a while.  She then introduced me to my room and made me some tea and I watched a good film: Hacksaw Ridge.  A bit forest grumpy but a nice film about a war and  conscientious objector.  A short while later, Wendy and some of her school kids arrived with bucket loads of food, most of it western food.

We ate and I introduced them to the game of spoon.  They loved it!  I am travelling and cannot upload videos.  A link is in clouded below:

https://1drv.ms/v/s!AnTXs8bPCbfPraNQsnq0StSvSzbuiA

After chatting for a while with Taylor and her husband, I took a shower and went to bed.  Just before I went to bed there was a power cut.  I have no pictures of my room but it was lovely!

Th at night as before I went to sleep something dawned on me.  I'd needed my trip wrongly.  I won't go into details here, but I'd messed it all up.  Before sleeping, I decided to sort it all out.  So I did.  I used the same app that I had used to book it all.  The app is Trip.com app.  It allowed me to change and cancel bookings and refunded me.  Yes there were penalty charges but negligable.  I can 100% recommend the app.  So the itinerary above is now nothing like what really happened.

So I got up early.  Taylor was late.  We were late.  Driving through the rush hour traffic we really thought I'd muss the train.  We made it with 15 minutes to spare!  The rest of the journey went well except for booking the last section of the journey to Zhongshan in stead of Zhongshan North station   A minor problem soon solved by a taxi ride.

First part if the journey was to Guiyang Station.  It's like an airport and run with real precision!  I had a few hours there, so I wandered around a bit.

I went up onto the balcony to look around and found this sign:

It amused me!  And I also found ....

Real beef!  Beef that means meat, not vein or stomach or lung!  Real beef!  It was not as good as I imagined, as y tastes are getting more Chinese but it was good!  And two cups of real coffee!  They sell it in Jiangkou but it nothing like normal coffee and it costs the price of a good meal!

Then I was off to Guangzhou. Some amazing sites on the way!  The strange little hills fascinated me!

Guangzhou was another massive station.  

It too had a McDonalds but I couldn't actually eat a second one.  I had Chinese instead!  Then off to Zhongshan to meet Julie.  A thirty minute journey, but at 150kph!

Shed bought me some food and a panda!

We then got a taxi to the hotel said goodnight and I went to bed.  It had blue lights!

It might seem strange to get a panda with "Hug me" written on it from a friend but we are just good friends.  I got a 'love me' soft  toy for my birthday from Sherrie and her husband!  An hugging is a standard 'joke' in China.  Westerners do it.  Chinese generally don't!