We arrived in Xining about 8:30 in the morning, met our local guide and walked to a nearby hotel where we were to have breakfast after our all night train ride and where we had rooms for the day. As we were going to catch another overnight train at 21:50 this evening. After checking in we were adviced that we could get to the breakfast room by taking the elevator to floor -2 and follow the signs. For a little while this seemed like strange advice as floor -2 was the parking garage. But with a little persistance we found the breakfast room on the other side of the garage.

Breakfast was a slightly comical affair, starting with a light green fruit juice that was served hot, and ending with trying to eat fried eggs with chop sticks. In the event that you are ever faced with this last challenge the collective wisdom of our group is that you pickup the entire egg with the sticks and take bites out of it. It helps if the eggs are not sunny side up.

Following Breakfast we were given a couple of hours to rest and/or freshen up in our rooms before a city tour. Xining is at an elevation of 2200 meters and has a population of about 1.5 million people though it seems much bigger that that number, with high rise accommodation that could house many times that number. When I asked the guide about this he suggested that owning multiple appartments is the only place locals have to invest their money.

By about 3:00 we were back in our rooms to rest and pack in preparation for our night train. Unfortunately the room Nina and I had was facing the afternoon sun and the A/C did not work so the temperature inside the room was in the high 30°C so we finished up spending much of the afternoon sitting in a corridor lounge.

Boarding the train was Standard-Operating-Procedure, passport check, security check, another passport check, lots of pushing and shoving, and lots of staff shouting through loud hailers. But eventually we were on the train, with the two of us in our 4 birth cabin. A quick change into PJs and we were off to sleep.