DAY 10

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Kwan and Dana have to go back to Hangzhou today at about 9, and we are back on the train to ShangHai - alone! We say goodbye at the hotel and head off for breakfast - coffee, fresh fruit and baked beans on toast with bacon, yum. We hang around in the hotel until about 11.30 then gather our gear and catch a taxi. 16 RMB to the train station and I think the driver was pissed off when I didn’t give him a tip! Waiting in the departure room a young guy walked up to us and asked us where we were from, he was a uni student and we got chatting for a bit. He knew were NZ was and wanted to do his masters there, we told him he would fit right in! He seemed like a really nice guy and it was good to chat with him. It was a piece of cake catching the train again, it was the same comfy one we had before only this one was faster - top speed we reached was 249 km/hr. I spent the whole trip staring out the window and trying to catch snapshots of the countryside. It would have been easier if the visibility was better, we barely had 1 km visibility for the whole trip! (about 300km) It was the same track we were on before, but this time I noticed a lot more heavy industry. (Maybe it was because I was on the opposite side of the train) The smog was so thick some of the chimneys just disappeared up into it. It was raining when we got to ShangHai and our first mistake was to walk straight out the exit instead of finding the indoor taxi pickup place. We were immediately approached by a woman asking us if we needed a taxi - we try to steer away from hawkers and looked for the closest thing we could see that looked like a taxi rank. They see the westerners coming and make a beeline straight for you, the first 2 guys we showed the piece of paper with the address on to tried to sell us a ride for 100 RMB! Now I new the hotel wasn’t close because I looked it up on the internet before we left Nanjing but 100 RMB sounded excessive so we moved on - and it was still raining! The next guy wanted to charge us 50 RMB which as it turned out was probably 20 RMB too much, but it was raining so we said OK. I couldn’t believe the amount of traffic for a Sunday afternoon but we got to the hotel with no drama, however, I made our second mistake by leaving the piece of paper in the taxi! It had the hotel name, room rate and address of the hotel on Beijing we were going to as well as Dana’s Chinese name which it was booked under - bugger! The people at the hotel were really good and we figured it out but I was going to have to contact John to contact Kwan to contact Dana to find out where we were going to next - phew! The hotel was really nice but the area was a bit out of the way and it actually looked a bit dodgy to tell the truth. We stayed in our room for the rest of the day and ate at the hotel restaurant. The restaurant staff didn’t speak any English but luckily the menu had pictures.

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Photos

Our Train
This is the pointy end, we don't have anything like this in NZ!

On the Train
Smog all the way for 300 km

On the Train
Boats working on the river

On the Train
More appartments

On the Train
Sorry about the quality, smog and fast trains make photography difficult.

Comments

[Jen]

awesome
loving the blogs keep it up! love you lots xoxox Jen.