Having been in Beijing for four weeks and settled (despite my hostel hopping) into some kind of routine, with Chinese language and cooking classes, I found it surprisingly difficult to leave. I think a big part of it was the daunting task of trying to elucidate a plan for my next month or two of travel in China – there's so much to see and do!
Where to start? This was difficult even though I'd cut the country in two in my overall plan.
In the end I got close enough to formulating a plan, though far from complete, with the first few destinations and resolved to get on the road again. However, in my 'settled' state, I wasn't yet confident enough with my basic language skills to buy my own train tickets and so resorted to the relatively expensive luxury of the hostel travel desk.
Having bought the tickets the day before departure, and as the station was barely three minutes walk from the hostel, I was relaxed about collecting them and left it until just over an hour before departure. As the girl was handing over the tickets, she froze.
“These are for today.” she said.
“Yep” I casually confirmed.
She looked at me, looked at the tickets, looked at her watch and back at me.
“You have to go.” She said in deadly serious English.
“You're going to miss your train” said her face in international body language.
Suitably panicked and starting to feel a little sick at the thought of missing my train, I raced around gathering my stuff from the storage room and legged it over to the station. Just like my first Chinese rail departure, the station was vast and had security checks at the entrance, but it didn't take long to get inside, find my departure hall and soon enough I was wondering what all the fuss was about as I waited for half an hour or so to depart on time, as expected.
