Meet George Jetson

Our home for 30 hours
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Ok, the title is a bit ambiguous but Nanning was so unexpected.  To us it was modern enough that we wouldn't have been surprised to see a Spacely Sprockets factory or the Jetsons whizzing around.  We had expected to see something a little more like Vietnam, a bit more... underdeveloped.

We arrived at Jiangnan Zhan station and were treated to our first example of Engrish: the "Station Loving Counter".  Brilliant!  But we still have no idea what it means.  Information pointed us to the local buses and we were off to the train station, agog at seeing such a modern city, plus we saw more BMWs, Audis and Lexus' (or is it Lexi?) than in Khandallah.  Blissfully we noticed that there was no incessant honking waging war on our eardrums, something we didn't get used to in South-East Asia.

we wouldn't have been surprised to see a Spacely Sprockets factory or the Jetsons whizzing around.

Adrienne reviewing a blog entry (we handwrite them if we can't get to a puter)
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Chao Yang Hotel had a room for us (RMB 50) and it seemed to be a fairly popular place for travellers.  Being opposite the train station, it was ideally located.  Dropping our bags, we went off to celebrate our arrival in China with dinner.  As per normal, we looked for the place which was very busy and most popular with the locals.  The place we chose was looked great and was bustling with people... yeah you caught us, it was McDonald's and it was bloody great!!!

Sean tried his hand at Chinese and managed to book us tickets to Shanghai on a hard sleeper train (RMB 391).  We didn't really do anything in Nanning because the next day we were off.  Loaded up with pottles of noodles, we boarded the train to find that we had the two top bunks out of the six in our compartment.  Our 30 hours on the train was wiled away by talking to a couple of Swiss girls, eating noodles, sleeping and reading.  The views on the first day were similar to the previous day's bus ride - lush green countryside with karsts rising out of nowhere.  Unfortunately our views on the second day were hampered by a haze of pollution; something of a theme throughout our trip in China.