Shanghai to Hong Kong Journey

In the normal manor for us two, we left booking our journey to Hong Kong until the last minute. This left us with only two options

1/ Pay a huge sum of money for a last minute flight which would have got us to Hong Kong in just over an hour.

2/ Take the cheaper train journey, but the downside would be the time it would take to get to Hong Kong.
We convinced ourselves that theres no fun in flying, so booked our one way seats to Hong Kong. We then checked the times on the tickets to find that the total journey would take a monster 27 hours !!!

We decided to travel by style to the train station, so we splashed out on a taxi rather than catch the bus.
On reaching the station, all you could see was a mass of people all dragging those giant sized asylum seeker bags ( The plastic zip sacks with blue, red and white stripes running through them ).

We had already purchased our tickets the day before, so we headed straight for the sign stating Soft Sleeper.
We were quickley stopped at the entrance by two ladies in uniform who couldn't speak any English, but were not going to let us through no matter how hard we tried.
After 10 minutes of hand signals and help from other people who had now joined a very long queue, we realised that we were trying to gain access to the waiting room for journeys within China - Silly me, I thought that we had given Hong Kong back !!
It seems that Hong Kong is a special administrative region, which seems to mean that it belongs to China, but you still need to go through a passport control as its treated as another country.

Going through the various security checks was a real scream, as there were very little signs in English. We adopted the approach of walking in the directions that we could understand and wait to be shouted at.
It seemed to work, and none of the guards went overboard when we would turn around to see where they were pointing to.

The train journey itself wasn't that bad.
We had two small single beds and a table, which is as good as your going to get on the best of trains in the UK.
The downside was the lack of a toilet, which meant having to share. This wasn't too bad for me, but Alison did have to agree that its a lot less bother when you dont have to hover !!!

Once the train got going, we only had to wait a couple of hours before dinner was being served.
It wasn't the best food that we have tasted since being in China, but it was OK and used up another hour of the journey.

After dinner Alison put her nose in a book, which left me to watch one of the B rate movies which I purchased whilst in Shanghai.
The only drawback was the fact that my laptop battery only lasted 30 minutes, and there was no power in the room.
I managed to find one in the walkway of the train, so made myself comfortable and carried on watching my film.
I had the odd interuption when the lady selling drinks would come past, as I needed to stand up and squeeze in to let her through.

After a reasonable nights sleep, we were woken up by the sun shining into the carriage.
We haven't seen much sun over the last few months, so this was a rather nice wake up call.

On looking out of the window of the train, all we could see were farmers in fields all wearing straw looking hats, with most still wearing the old style blue jackets.
All their farming still seems to be carried out by hand other than plowing the fields which they still use Ox for.

After a few of hours of watching Chinese life in the country, we arrived in Hong Kong feeling reasonably fresh although I am not sure that everyone else would have agreed !