D5675, Shanghai South Railway Station to Hangzhou, 17.58 scheduled arrival time. This wasn’t a train that I was anticipating sitting on. A couple of weeks ago I booked a flight from Shanghai to Kuala Lumpur on Air Asia X. I never took too much notice of the airport as I figured I’d sort it out when I arrived in Shanghai.

Terracotta Warriors, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China – Images by Jamie McDonald
Well, one thing I have learnt in the past week since leaving Xi’an and arriving in Beijing. Don’t ever, ever catch the bus from Xi’an to Pingyao – it is bus number AF432 and it leaves from the bus station next to the train station in Xi’an.
It is a sleeper bus that costs 144 Yuan, and whilst in the first instance that is steep, when they leave over 2 hours late, and then fill the corridors with twenty to thirty people …