So, 20 hours on a train is a LONG TIME and I really didn't enjoy the experience very much. The train itself was fine (other than a few screaming kids, but headphones fixed that and a terrible toilet (one squatty toilet for about 100 beds of people makes for a horrifying smell)). It was the scenery that really put me off.
Zhangjiajie may have been semi-rural, but the tourist money was certainly helping the town, with a brand new shopping centre and street cleaners, but from the train, all I could see was just how poor so so so many Chinese people are.
My photos aren't great as most of them turned out a blurry mess. There were houses that looked like they were in the process of being demolished, with clothes from the people still living there drying out the front; parents carrying their small children while hoeing a field in the rain with half a dozen other mothers; people cleaning their clothes by beating them with a stick in a dirty river and people leading a mule with a trailer loaded up with boxes taller than any of them...
I knew that China was still developing, but maybe naiively, I thought that the huge overpopulated high-rises apartments that go on identically for kilometers was bad enough. What I saw wasn't even Western China, it was just a few hundred kilometers from Shanghai.
The first thing I saw when I got off the train at Shanghai was a Prada store, and thousands of people using iPhones. It's hard to believe it's the same country.
Tomorrow, Shanghai xx