From Dengfeng to Xi'An

This was a pretty uneventful trip, and I didn't even take any photographs.  The bus from Dengfeng to Luoyang was on time (!), although we were packed in like sardines.  The bus had a row of fold-down seats in the aisle, so when all the regular seats were filled they packed us into the aisle.  Literally no way to get out in case of emergency.

We arrived in Luoyang in a different bus station that I had departed from (!), not sure if they've just rebuilt it in the past week.  This one was a lot bigger and newer looking.  Since I'd left lots of time in case of delays, I now had about 6 hours to kill in Luoyang before my train.  I picked up a "han bao" (I think it's called, like a hamburger with chopped pork, or maybe fox meat who knows) from a street vendor and munched on it and studied my map.  I decided to kill a hour at my favourite Luoyang cafe with a "na tie" (I'm getting a coffee roughly every 2 to 3 days now) and catch up on my blog writing.

The exciting part (for me) - it was too short a drive to interest the cabbies, so I hitched a ride on the back of a motorbike.  Yep, me with all my packs, no helmet, driving through Chinese traffic.  I figured if the bike went over I'd try to land on my pack lol  Unusual for China, the driver of the bike WAS wearing a helmet.

I had a nice "na tie", spent about an hour writing my blog (no wi fi unfortunately) and then grabbed a cab to the train station.  There's supposed to be free wi fi here but all the instructions are in Chinese and I can't figure out how to get it to text me an activation code!

Met an American on the train who invited me down to San Francisco to visit home on his sailboat.

Ethan picked me up at the airport, drove me to my hotel, and took me out to dinner.  I'll post pics later.  Of course I'm having issues with the wi fi in the hotel - it seems to work ok but my VPN doesn't work at all, I guess the government has tracked me down and closed that loophole :-(

Xi'An seems like a pretty cool city.  I'm going to wander about tomorrow and maybe hire a bike and cycle the circuit of the city wall :-)