(The following is an account of the night of Aug 30 and the day of Aug 31)

I was leaving Beijing for Wuhu in the middle of the night. Well it was more like it was 9pm. Is that considered to be the middle of the night? I was travelling with my teammate Bethany and our waiban, or foreign affairs officer.

The train station was immensely busy that night. Not only were there passengers trying to get to their trains, there were renovations going on. It was quite a scene to behold.

For those of you who are not familiar with how Chinese trains work, let me tell you. There are basically two kinds of tickets for overnight trains. There is the hard-sleeper ticket. That gets you a nice hard bed in a compartment with 5 other people. The compartments have no doors to speak of, as far as I understand. There are just simply walls between the compartments and its all open to the corridor where people walk by. The second type is called the soft-sleeper. That gets you a soft bed in a compartment with 3 other people. The soft-sleeper rooms provide more privacy because there is a door. Amazing, isn't it? And there is also an additional wall that separates the compartments from the corridor.

Guess which one I slept in? The soft-sleeper. Although ideally, I would like to have had a hard bed inside a soft-sleeper type room. I got a major backache in the morning. I could barely tie my shoelaces when I got up.

That wasn't our only problem. Typically, these trains have air conditioning. However, our car's AC just broke before we boarded the train. What luck? Let me tell you, it was a hot and humid 17 hour train ride. After some of my naps, I'd wake up with huge drops of sweat on my arm. I must say that was very disconcerting.

As for meals, breakfast left much to be desired, but lunch wasn't too shabby.

In my sleeper room, there were two Chinese nationals apart from myself and Bethany. They must have found it very interesting communicating with a Chinese boy who couldn't speak much Mandarin and a Westerner who could carry more of a conversation than the Chinese boy. I communicated a little bit with writing, but not much.

After a long ride, I was happy to be back on solid ground in Wuhu. Yes, I had finally made it.