Day 4

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Today was an interesting day.

We didn't get up so early today.

First thing was to pack our bags and check out, we left the bags at the hotel to collect later.

From there we headed to the Lama Temple towards the north of Beijing, this to be honest was my favourite temple of all.

As you walked round you could see many local people praying to the different Buddha's located around the temple, bring insistence stick and making offerings of food, money and flowers.

Within the temple was many rooms with different Buddha's of the many different spirits, the best was the last room with a Buddha that holds a Guinness world records for being the biggest Buddha carved out of once piece of Sandalwood standing at 26 meters tall, this was amazing.

Words can't explain how spiritual this place was.

From there we headed into the main shopping area to grab something to eat then to the hotel and on to the train station.

Once we had worked out which window we had to go to to collect our tickets from we headed into the train station and to the waiting area.

As we sat there we realised we were the only westerners there and we didn't have a clue what was going on, the queue for the platform seemed to just get longer and longer for no reason.

After about an hour something was said over the tannoy system and the herd started to move, at this point in true Chinese fashion we butted into the queue and followed everybody like a flock of sheep.

This seemed to work and within minutes we were handing our tickets to a conductor who gave us a card to our private sleeper cabin for the night.

We settled in to what was actually an OK cabin and prepared for our 13 hours trip to Chengsha, at this point I was feeling like Michael Palin from around the world in 80 days.

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