I slept wonderfully last night despite the occasional bumps and the man that came into our room by accident. We both woke early and then went back to sleep with the curtains open and the sunlight on our faces. This really is a wonderful way to travel.

We had fruit and chocolate for breakfast and after reading for a while and dozing, we had lunch. The lady said that the restaurant was closing now, at 1pm, so there were only two dishes available - we had one of each. They were both some sort of chicken with green sticks that might have been bamboo, on in a thick brown sauce the other mostly sauceless. Both went well with the rice. Then I finished my book and Mikey had a nap. The sun started setting at about 4, and it's looked like a proper autumn day all day, the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. There were people cuting hay and transporting it on bikes in the misty morning, this afternoon the sun was low and golden and turning the brick walls surrounding every major settlement into warm barricades and there are rice fields and crops doing their thing.The ground looks very dry and most of the grass on the verges is dead and brown. According to the scrolly toaster at the end on the carriage, the temperature outside has ranged between 50 degrees this morning and 76 at midday. It's 60 right now. We're speeding through China at about 90mph.

We arrived in Beijing at about 4.30 and skipped through customs with no problems at all. There was a bag x-raying machine that was mostly ignored and then we were out of the station and in the middle of a city of 14 million people. It was cold, which is the first thing I noticed and the second and third, in close succession, were the huge, gelatinous globs of spit on the pavements everywhere and that virtually everyone was wearing a brown jacket.

Mikey went to find a bank machine and I was left to fend off offers of taxis and hotel rooms for about 20 minutes. I was quite a popular sight, and most people stared at me standing in the station courtyard freezing in only my Hotel California t-shirt. Mikey returned empty-handed but we had Hong Kong dollars and I'd read (in the great little non-Lonely Planet book that was actually written by someone who's been to China) that these notes would be accepted by most people. We followed vague signs to a subway in the search for a taxi and four men pounced on us offering us a ride. I would have been happy with a real taxi but we couldn't see one and it was easier this way. He said it was a metered taxi, and then told us it would cost 400 yuan, (he didn't even know where we wanted to go) about ten times the amount the hotel said it should cost. Mikey and I were still wondering if they'd accept the Hong Kong dollars when another man butted in with a reluctant offer of 100 yuan. One of the men looked at the 100 dollar note and nodded and then between the four of them carried our bags to a tiny silver car. There was barely enough room for one bag in the boot, the other shared the back seat with Mikey and I, and the driver and his friend climbed in the front. The only address we had for the hotel was a gif file the hotel had sent us with Chinese characters - we hadn't been able to print anything out before we left Hing Kong, and the man peered at it on Mikey's PDA. He nodded and we set off.

The trip took about an hour and a half and involved a couple of phone calls to the hotel to find out exactly where they were. It should have taken about twenty minutes! Mikey paid the man who seemed happy with his detour on his way home, and then both the driver and his friend hung around for a while, and took our bags into the impressive-looking hotel. We were actually in the motel-like section round the corner and the hotel doorman put the bags into the car and gestured for the driver to follow us. It was all quite strange.

At the motel reception desk we encountered our first language barrier - we had no yuan and they only accepted Chinese money. We managed to point to the words 'Bank of China' and 'tomorrow' in our guidebook, and after a call to the English-speaking receptionist in the other hotel, it was explained to everyone that I would leave a deposit here tonight and change my money in the big hotel down the road in the morning. A lot of fuss was made about our passports again and then we were shown to our room. We had no key - we would be let into our room by a doorman whenever we needed to be.

We went for a quick walk down the road and located the big tourist hotel. We changed a bit of Hong Kong money for renminbi (People's Money) and bought a map. Then, asking nicely at the reception desk, we were shown where the nearest Bank of China was and set out for it. It was a longer walk than we expected but we found it in the end. We learned also that traffic lights do not apply to taxis and buses, and that we have to be very careful crossing the road as cars don't tend to stop at crossings. On the way back we stopped at a corner shop for some snacks and had a small picnic in our room when we got back.