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Day 56
When we woke in Macau we thought someone was spraying a power shower at the window - the rain that had persisted during our trip to Macau had come back with a vengeance and there was no sign of it letting up. Deciding it was not ideal tanning weather for the beach we had a bit of a lie in and packed our things to head straight for Shenzhen in China instead.
We walked to the bus stop at 10:30am and where usually there is a blistering sun needing some strong sunglasses, there was a sky so dark that the streetlights were on! Boarding a bus, ferry, 2 tube trains ... picking up our other bags ... 2 more tube trains and an overland train we found ourselves at the border back into China. Going through the border our visas held up and we were welcomed back in. We headed for the local shopping mall (with our back packs still firmly strapped to our backs) filled with cheap 'genuine designer' clothes, handbags, shoes etc. We thought we might buy a few things to send home for our return but after trudging around (and with neither of
us real label slaves) we bought one t-shirt for Mark and got out of there - it wasn't as cheap as we were hoping and it was difficult to buy stuff for two years in the future - who knows what you'll like then or whether it will still fit!
On one more tube we headed for our bed for the evening at the Shenzhen YH where we cooked ourselves some dinner and had a relaxing evening where Chrissie managed to beat Mark playing some rather vicious air hockey!
Day 57
We got up and went to take full advantage of the free breakfast, however neither of us liked the rice soup/pudding they served so we stocked up on boiled eggs and dumplings (altough the canteen lady didn't give us more than one without a fight)!
Packed up, we made our way to the bus station where we had a mad 30 seconds to get the next bus (or wait another hour). With the help of a friendly local we caught it in the nick of time taking us to Guangzhou where we were to catch our ongoing train across the country. We had a 10 min walk through some torrential rain finding that the only tickets they had left were for the soft sleeper (more expensive and posher). We decided that rather than staying a night and getting the cheaper tickets for the next day we would treat ourselves to a bit of luxury for our 26hr journey. After getting the tickets we headed for our special waiting room, which had some really comfortable leather seats (a lot nicer than the hard sleeper waiting rooms where you end up on the floor or your bag), and got a KFC for lunch as there wasn't really anything else on offer at the station.
Feeling particularly upper class, we were called for our train and made our way to our soft sleeper carriage (which has only 4 rather than 6 bunks to a section and actually has a door - how posh). Get this - it even has antimacassars on the bunks. "What's an antimacassar?" "I don't know but there haven't been any macassars around here for a long time"
Day 58
The next 26 hours went really quickly with a lot of relaxing, reading and eating. Before we knew it we were in Kunming. We plan to get the train from China to Vietnam from Kunming in a couple of weeks and will need to stay here for a few days whilst we arrange our Vietnam visas so we thought we'd be gluttons for punishment and book a sleeper bus out for the same evening. We are destined for Dali and a couple of days of R and R.
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kateyevans
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come on, send me your revised itinary!! we must meet up somewhere in thailand