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Published: March 19th 2011
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The train was a big long sleeper, and, after making friends with a woman and her son, along with a little girl who came to look at the foreign person, stayed up until past midnight jus chatting with these kids, showing them pictures and playing games. It was really good fun, and sadly had to part with them at Xuancheng.
After finally arriving at Tunxi, some Chinese students started talking to me at the train station, and ended up taking me to the old street of the city and helping me find accommodation. Tunxi's old town is really nice, though it does get exceedingly busy at times, and I ended up buying quite a few bits and bobs to send to the family back home. I also visited a small touristy village outside Tunxi, which was very nice, if not probably a bit too developed for the tourist trade, with a decent amount of hawkers wandering around trying to take your money. Made friends with a Tea seller and had a nice long chat with him, and some free tea! Anyway, I wandered away from the town and ended up climbing through some lovely tea fields and through some little
Fishing in Xiaoqi
...It was so peaceful here, with much less tourists and a river running through the middle of town. bamboo forests.
After this, I headed back to Tunxi and got a bus on to Wuyuan- a region in northern Jiangxi which is well known for its amazing scenery. On the bus I ended up making friends with a 60+ years old Chinese teacher who was on holiday and travelling around the place. And, though not completely understanding what he was saying, ended up agreeing to travel together for the next few days. We arrived in Qinghui and started by trying to look at the Rainbow Bridge which, being the low season, was covered in scaffolding and quite obviously renovated to the point that very little left was actually original.
Now, my man, for some reason being very averse to paying entrance fees, took me on a half hour hike with some other Chinese we met up with on an interesting route to eventually bypass the ticket gate.
The next day we popped to a few different places and ended up staying in a small town called Xiao Qi. Now this place was a proper Chinese village, there were very few tourists there, and it was an amazingly beautiful village in the middle of crop fields, surrounded
The River
With a lovely old tree... by mountains, and with a river running through the middle. We had a good little wander, and then helped the owners of the house we were living in cook food before heading to bed.
After getting up early to see the sun rise, we headed on to a few more places before i had to go on. Eventually though, it was time to leave and I had a relatively decent bus journey to Jingdezhen before my train to Xiamen on the south Coast. Now I hadn't completely booked my train, and as a result ended up turning up to the train station to find that there were no more sleeper or seated tickets left for this 19 hour journey, so...slightly apprehensive I bought the worst ticket you possibly could, which is effectively a 'get what you can' ticket. After spending the afternoon with an English guy and an Australian who were also getting a train from Jingdezhen...needless to say we got through about a crate and a half of big Chinese beers, in a small restaurant with a very drunken Chinese guy, and then finally headed on to the train Station to prepare to go.
These guys had an
The Canals of Little Likeng
and the many, many bridges. amazing way to say farewell to people, and in the middle of the train station, one of them cracked out the guitar while me and the other British guy sang the Beatles to the assembled hundreds of Chinese people. It was hilarious!
I finally boarded the train, and, thankfully having made friends with a Chinese girl in the queue ended being able to perch on the edge of her seat during parts of the trip, which was relative comfort to the places that other people were sitting/standing/sprawling. Needless to say it wasn't an amazingly comfortable journey, and for about an hour’s worth of it I was having a staring competition with a Chinese baby...
When we finally arrived there was a huge collective sigh of relief, and everybody disembarked the train in a bit of a rush to get away from the smells that had built up (the toilets were nasty)
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G&G
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fantastic photos
I especially like the little bridges in the village also the reflections and thesmiling children.