Shanghai

Trip Start Dec 02, 2007
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Trip End Sep 01, 2008


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Flag of China  , Shanghai,
Monday, May 26, 2008

Another journey across China, and another sleeper train. This time we decided to up the comfort levels and opted for a soft sleeper, a closed compartment with supposedly softer beds, as the name implies. What they don't tell you is that if the train does not originate where you join it, you shpuld expect to find people sleeping in your bed. Luckily for us, our train had come all the way from Lhasa in Tibet, so our first task on boarding was to remove the freeloaders from our room.


Our train pulled out of the station at 9pm and by ten past everyone seemed to be asleep, and of course, snoring away. To avoid an uncomfortable couple of hours reading by torch light, before we would be ready to sleep, we retired to the corridor where we found two English guys also escaping the early-to-bed culture of the Chinese. What with them being roughly the same age as us and working as IT consultants, naturally they hailed from the hallowed ground of SW London so we swapped favourite restaurants in not just China and SE Asia, but also exotic Earlsfield. We also had a chuckle at them finding a family of six encamped in their beds when they boarded the train...


Our trip to Shanghai was dual purpose- there are very few tourist attractions in the city- to catch up with a friend from EY who is on secondment there, and try and get visas for India after our failed attempts in Sydney Soft sleeper carriage
Soft sleeper carriage
 . After finally tracking down Indian visa services in the vast urban sprawl that is Shanghai, we were told they would need to retain our passports for over a week As it is impossible to so much as check into a hotel in China without a passport, we decided that the fates were against our trip to the sub-continent and that we should instead travel from China to Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. Tough break!


With a couple of spare days before our onward trip to Southern China, we made the most of Shanghai's strong reputation as China's culinary Mecca. We enjoyed fantastic Japanese food with our new friends from the train and 'the Irishman', Greg, from Xi'an, and were pleased to take a brief break from Asian cuisine, enjoying a Spanish feast with our friend James and his girlfriend, in Shanghai's French Quarter!


A few pounds heavier and very excited about our new travel plans, we decided that a twenty five hour train journey would be a bit too much railway fun (and significantly more expensive than flying), so we headed to Shanghai's domestic airport and a flight that after three major cities would take us to see some of the spectacular scenery to be found in the Chinese countryside.
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