The distance between the Shanghai and Hangzhou is 177 kilometres, but we got there in under an hour, travelling at 300km/h. This was our first experience on a High-Speed Train in China and its speed (in comparison to the open windows and gentle motion of the trains we had taken in South East Asia) was something of a shock – though we managed to take a few mildly blurry shots with our camera.

Once we pulled out of the station, the fringe of Shanghai’s vast suburban construction belt soon came into view. The evidence of fast expansion was hard to miss and we passed hundreds of small apartment blocks built in neatly arranged streets, in addition to slightly less sturdy looking housing blocks surrounding construction sites (perhaps for the people working on them). Considering that the city is still growing at a rate of a million people a decade, this construction is probably necessary but it was almost difficult to detect where the urban sprawl of Shanghai stopped and Hangzhou began.

We arrived in Hangzhou in the late afternoon, expecting to find a little tourist town surrounded by tea plantations. Our research should have been more thorough: the centre of Hangzhou is less of a country retreat and more of a sprawling metropolitan city housing 4 million people. When tourists speak of Hangzhou they are more than likely referring to the lake and ‘People’s Pleasure Garden’ which is about a fifteen to twenty minute bus ride from the city centre. After getting stuck in a long queue of traffic on the lake road (which is nearly always backed up with fuming coaches carrying daytrippers from the surrounding cities) we eventually got to our hostel which was located a few minutes walk from the famous “West Lake”.

It was one of the first hot days we had experienced in China so far and so we waited until evening to really explore our surroundings. After the majority of the day tourists had gone home, we found the lake to be rather beautiful and peaceful. It helped that all the magnolias had started to blossom leaving a wonderful scent in the air at dusk. The West Lake itself is pretty big and it takes about two hours to walk all the way around it so we decided to leave that for another day.

The next morning we were awoken at 6am to the sounds of Big Ben chiming. It took me a while to remember where I was and with bleary eyes, I opened the blind in our attic hostel room to find a schoolyard below and groups of children lining up in a very orderly fashion to the sound of the bell. The children then began to sing (a mixture of English and Chinese songs), making it impossible to go back to sleep, so we decided to head out for the day. As we were up early, we asked some people in the hostel about journeying up to the Lion’s Peak of Hangzhou, where Lóngjǐng (translated in English as Dragon Well), one of the most famous teas in China, is grown. What’s more, we had heard that the picking of the highly valued first flush had just begun and if we visited the right pickers we might be able to buy some at an affordable price. Luckily there was a bus stop just near the hostel along the West Lake road and about half an hour later a bus with some vines painted onto its side pulled up – so we were pretty sure it was the right one. We weren’t entirely confident as to where we should get off so we slightly winged it and travelled through a few villages, where we could see people returning from their early morning tea pickings with the leaves balanced in baskets on their heads. About 10 minutes later, the bus stopped ascending and the land flattened out with miles and miles of tea plantations before us. The bus came to a stop and as we realised we were almost the on only ones left on it, we decided that this was as good a spot as any to explore from. It was the right choice as we found ourselves conveniently outside the Green Tea restaurant, which we had heard about from someone in Shanghai. The queues outside were already forming so we decided to take a ticket and try it out.

We were glad we joined the queue early as it continued to grow until early afternoon. We found the location slightly better than the food but the menu choice and variety is pretty unbeatable and the free green tea on tap enriched the view of endless rows of tea-bushes that we could see from our table.

The more interesting items on the menu were Deep Fried Shredded Lotus, Spicy Bullfrog, Traditional Style Braised Duck Feet and Tea Tree Mushroom Stir Fry. We went for the Green Tea Roast Chicken (which was absolutely delicious, seeing as we had been mainly surviving on noodles for a couple of days by that point), followed by stuffed tomatoes and a mixture of boiled vegetables and potato.

The Green tea restaurant sits next to the National China Tea Museum, which is attached to a tea school and teaching rooms for those studying tea at university! Tea is taken pretty seriously here (you get the impression that they’d heavily disapprove of a bag of PG Tips or Tetley’s) and as well as a centre of learning the nearby fields are also a very popular backdrop for bridal photography – I think we saw about five or six different bridal parties all jostling for the best position while we made our way through the tea fields.

The Tea Museum itself contains a wealth of information which we are woefully ignorant of in the tea-drinking West, surprising when you consider how culturally important tea has become in Britain, at least. As we were coming out of season, we arrived to find the museum half empty and were greeted by a resident tea expert who took us to a back room full of glass teapots and kettles. She showed us many of the traditional tea preparation methods and allowed us to sample a wide variety of teas that they grow in the research plots in the museum.

One difference that she pointed out between tea preparation in China and Europe is that the Chinese always fill the entire pot once and empty it before brewing the tea for real. This ‘rinses’ any nasty taste from the outside of the tea leaves and warms the pot before allowing the tea to soak and release its real flavours. Different kinds of tea also need brewing for different times, and some black teas can be refilled over 10 times, yielding different combinations of flavours each time you pour.

Green tea drinkers also tend to drink the tea with the leaves in the glass (whether the tea leaves float or not is a matter of good luck!) and much care and attention goes into choosing the right blend for the mood and social setting, much as a wine would be selected in Europe. Green tea is by far the most popular kind of tea, followed by Black tea and then Oolong tea, which is often confused for the same but has a different method of harvesting and preparation!

Leaf tea and ‘tea cakes’ (compressed tea leaves) are much more popular than tea bags here in China (especially as most Western tea bags are bleached before being filled with tea!), and most of the teapots we saw for sale at the museum had built-in filters to catch the tea leaves and stop the larger ones from escaping into your teapot.

The last part of the museum focuses on traditional methods of tea preparation and serving across different regions in China. There was some time spent on the Gongfu tea preparation method that we came across in Hong Kong, and also some rooms decorated in traditional styles for serving tea (my favourite was the butter tea commonly served in Tibet).

Despite the wealth of information and the natural beauty of the surrounding fields there wasn’t much actual picking going on and we couldn’t find any tea to buy apart from the overpriced, nicely packaged boxes in the museum (which we had a feeling were all from last year’s crop). The sun was beginning to set so we decided to continue our journey up to the hills again the following day, staying on the bus about ten or fifteen minutes longer in an attempt to track down some of the real ‘first flush’.

In contrast to the day before it was a very wet morning but that didn’t dampen our excitement at finally finding what we thought was Lonjing itself and its fields and fields of tea bushes, each being carefully pruned by about twenty or thirty pickers in straw hats. We walked through the beautiful plantations where swifts were darting in and around the bemused pickers, until we found a nearby village (which we found out was not Lonjing but somewhere in between). This actually worked in our favour as there were no tourists here and at one of the local tea houses, with the aid of phrasebooks and hand gestures, we therefore managed to procure a small tin of the ‘first flush’ tea (at a negotiable price) which would keep us going through the rest of the journey. We also found a small heat-resistant water bottle with a tea filter built in, which allowed us to make leaf tea from our supply on the move for the rest of the long journey home.

We spent the rest of the day walking amongst fields of tea leaves as the rain cleared, which is a surreal experience for those unaccustomed to the sight. The organised rows of trimmed tea bushes (which would grow into entire trees if left on their own) have an effect on the landscape unlike any other, allowing you to see across the undulating hills for miles around, each one lined with little rows of different shades of green.

Pickers from the local villages (each village collective manages a plot of tea bushes and collects the harvest) walk between the rows and hand-pick the fully-grown leaves. All the picking is done by hand rather than machine as this preserves the tea’s flavour and makes sure that all the juices stay inside the leaves until the moment they are pressed (mechanical pickers, while allowing cheaper production, tend to damage the leaves and impair the taste and quality of the resulting tea).

At dusk, we returned to the West Lake in preparation for our onwards journey North the next day. The boatmen who ferry people around the lake all day were making their way back home to their various docks. Seeing the sun set behind the silhouette of the nearby mountains and watching the tiniest ripples float across the lake was a beautiful way to end our time here. We made the most of the peace and tranquility because our next stop would be Beijing, the starting point of our long journey home through Russia…

Dawn rose as we reached the edges of the suburbs and the city became illuminated with a smoggy haze. At a crossing I noticed a smartly dressed police officer trying to lure a cat off the tracks with a sucking noise while people scurried past him and each other on foot and moped trying to get to work. It was a relief to leave the franticness of the city behind and it wasn’t long before we were in open, breathable countryside – among lush green pastures farmed by one or two early risers. A few stations along, the train began to fill up with local traders carrying bananas, rice packaged in banana leaves and other breakfast delicacies, which seemed to go down well with the other passengers. As we ate some mango slices we had just bought from one of the sellers, the landscape outside began to subtly shift from grazing land into paddy fields which in turn gave way to rivers, stilted housing and large areas of wetland. What we hadn’t read about this train journey from anywhere before is that it provides an absolutely fantastic opportunity to spot wetland birds. The train snaked alongside small canals of water for almost three hours, passing entire fields filled with white ibis, tall statue-like herons, small water rails, kingfishers and countless other wetland inhabitants. For bird watchers and nature lovers this train journey would be worth taking for the wildlife alone (especially as the tickets cost a total of £1.50 each).

The six hours passed quickly and we both managed to have a small sleep before arriving at Aranyaprathet. By now, the sun was gradually climbing the sky and the heat was intensifying, so it was a relief that we met up with Sarah and Guy and tackled the tuk-tuk negotiating together (the actual border point is a short drive from the station). To avoid unnecessary hassle and scamming, we had got e-visas online a few days before, which is well worth doing as without them, tuk-tuk drivers will attempt to drive you to visa points before the border which are all basically scams. Our tuk-tuk driver did attempt this but we were able to present him with our e-visa and demanded to be taken straight to the border, which he reluctantly accepted. The Aranyaprathet/Poipet border crossing has improved massively in recent years, though the government on the Cambodian side have now set up transport schemes for tourists which make it very difficult to get anything apart from government-approved transport to Siem Reap (and is obviously set at inflated tourist prices). We had printed and read a fantastic guide, written by a local who crosses the border often, which explains all the workings of the border crossing and points out the pitfalls. You can find it at Tales of Asia. The border crossing itself was fairly painless. First we were stamped out of Thailand, and then had to walk across a dusty road in between the two checkpoints in order to reach the Cambodian immigration office. This is a major transport hub between the two countries and we saw families pulling heavily laden wagons and sacks, along side trucks full of live pigs squealing in the heat. We had to walk behind the truck all across the border which was difficult to watch.

'Poipet' by MsNina on Flickr

If you don’t have an e-visa you can still buy a visa at the border, though the queues can be very long. Once you’ve got your visa and filled in a health card you can get stamped into Cambodia, which was very quick and efficient (they even take fingerprints) once you reach the office. Once you are on the other side, you are swiftly shepherded onto a bus which takes you to a transport centre where all the government-approved transport options are waiting for you. We have heard that people have still managed to get into Poipet to make their own arrangements for travel, but the guys hanging outside the immigration office make this very difficult for tourists. It is worth trying to get to Poipet to at least eat before your onwards travel as the food at the transport hub is both overpriced and terrible. They will also insist that you must buy some Cambodian riel or dollars at the exchange, but whatever they say, you are not obliged to do this. All their transport prices are in dollars, the de facto currency of Cambodia, so it is worth taking at least $50 with you across the border. We shared one of their cabs which came to $45 which we split between the four of us. There have been reports of some taxis dropping passengers outside Siem Reap if they had been paid upfront but our taxi driver was pretty good and took us to our hotel (the Golden Temple Villa) after asking someone for directions in the town.

The journey from Poipet to Siem Reap takes about three hours but thankfully the road has been much improved (from dirt track to a single gravelly road). It didn’t take long to fully realise how different Cambodia is from its richer Thai neighbour. Buffalo and horse drawn carts were as numerous as cars and chickens and ducks pecked in the dust along most of the roadside. The houses were mainly stilted and wooden with haystacks and cows dotted around front yards. It may be what the Thais term as a more ‘simple existence’ but I couldn’t help but find it beautiful after a week in Bangkok. Cambodia is still a relatively rural country, the most built up towns being Phnom Penh (the capital) and Siem Reap (which is the accommodation hub for those visiting Angkor Wat). The latter is where we were headed and despite being perhaps the most touristy town in Cambodia there are still many delightful pockets of it left to explore, as we were to find out…

Trying our luck, we turned to the office ladies who were composing themselves and we asked in very bad Thai about the possibility of booking onto a bus, that day. One of them raised her eyebrows and picked up the telephone. After five or six phone calls involving lots of rapid speech, we were told “Yes, there is a bus… you will be VIP” (but what she meant was, you will pay VIP prices). Not wanting to be stranded in Trang, we took her up on her offer, after which the American chuckled and said, “The buses aren’t that bad”. I asked him what he was doing in Trang, to which he responded “Oh, I’m waiting for the train“, after which I quickly started to lose my sense of humour. We were told to come back a few hours later when someone would accompany us to the bus station, so we sat in a local café for a few hours, checking emails and calming/cooling down with a beer and an iced chocolate alongside a French man who was also waiting for the train (which he had sensibly booked in advance).

At about 5pm a Thai student turned up, and said that she would take us to the bus station and wait with us until the bus arrived. When we asked why, she said, “You know, it’s safer”… By this point we were beginning to really wonder about this bus. At the bus station itself, we were noticeably the only Westerners present (until a couple of German girls arrived later to catch a local bus) but most people either smiled or ignored us, and we didn’t feel uncomfortable at all. Our bus driver eventually turned up looking like an East Village hipster (white crocodile shoes, skinny jeans, tight band t-shirt and a little waistcoat and shades) and more scarily like he should have been in school rather than driving double-deckers cross-country. He motioned in the direction of the upstairs of a bus whose windows were stuffed full of cuddly toys (we wondered how he’d have any space to see the road). We said goodbye to the Thai student (whose English was much better than our phrasebook Thai) and boarded the bus. The downstairs was full of parcels and post so we climbed upstairs as we had been motioned to and were pleasantly surprised to find comfortable, spacious seats complete with a bottle of water, a custard pie and a pillow to make the 13-hour journey more bearable. Our fellow passengers were very helpful, showing us where to put our luggage, where the blankets were etc. so perhaps the American had been winding us up after all.

As dusk began to set in, we passed hundreds of rubber trees and could see rows and rows of little taps fitted to the bases of their bark with buckets underneath. Later we stopped to pick up a couple more passengers outside a sunset market where the last of the day’s wares were being flogged. Pirates Of The Caribbean dubbed in Thai was our entertainment for the evening, as well as the repetitive soundtrack of some irritatingly catchy Thai pop songs. At 9pm we paused at a local service station, our last stop before Bangkok, where we had a quick wash before getting ready for bed. My iPod provided an eerie soundtrack to the nightly goings on outside as I tried but failed to get to sleep. Around 1am, we passed a prison-like lorry which was crammed full of people looking out from between bars. Other trucks with wooden slats drove by, and I could see figures playing card-games at drinking tables through the light-filled cracks – the first of many portable gambling dens we were to see. I finally got to sleep and was woken a few hours later when the bus abruptly stopped in a long line of three-lane traffic – at this point I knew we were in Bangkok.

Still bleary-eyed when we left the bus, we stupidly managed to get into the only taxi which wasn’t a taxi at all but an opportunist who couldn’t actually read or write Thai. We only found this out ten minutes into the drive when she swiftly pulled over and dragged me by the elbow out of the car and into the dimly lit house of one of her friends who she motioned to read the map and directions I had in my hands. Quite a frightening experience at 6am in a strange city but she did finally lead us back to the car, where she promptly upped the price and would only agree to take us further if we paid her three times what we had first agreed. I had heard about all sorts of scams in Bangkok but I didn’t expect to be subject to one quite so quickly. Not wanting to get dragged into any more strange houses for perhaps a more sinister purpose, we reluctantly agreed to pay and felt relieved when she dropped us off on the small bridge which arched over the quiet canal-side hotel we had booked at the recommendation of a friend. Even though it was only 6.30 am, breakfast was being laid out and we were brought cups of coffee and pancakes which tasted incredible after our early morning adventure. A couple of other travellers arrived just after we’d sat down and said they’d just come off the train we couldn’t get on, which they’d caught last night from the next stop along from Trang. It was so packed, they hadn’t slept at all which made me think of the comfy bus and its cuddly toy obsessed hipster driver with a new level of fondness.

At the station we had just enough time to grab a quick coffee before boarding the train (we were told that, unlike America’s Amtrak, trains here tend to leave on time and the doors shut promptly at 30 seconds prior to departure). We made it on with five minutes to spare and the train was pretty full but clean and comfortable and we rather looked forward to relaxing for the next 11 hours. The Melbourne-Sydney/Sydney-Melbourne trains are nearly always full, thanks in part to the very reasonable ticket prices, which are kept deliberately low as part of some sort of ‘visit Sydney’ promotion. It seems to have worked, as several of our fellow passengers, who usually fly the distance, admitted that they have begun to take the train instead to save time and money. The hours travelled may be longer but the cutting out of airport time and transfers, in combination with the more relaxed atmosphere, mean that they actually get more work done on the train.

It didn’t take long before we had left the city and its surrounding suburbs behind and were passing green and rocky farmland, complete with wind farms, cows, sheep and horses. It could almost have been England (especially when it was announced that Devonshire Cream Teas were now being served), except for the surprising skinniness of the cows and the passing blurs of Cockatoos and Galahs. The countryside continued to whizz by, in between brief stops at quaint country stations such as Cootamundra, Wagga Wagga and Henty. Being late Spring, the Yarrow was in full flower, turning the fields a brilliant yellow and giving the landscape a dusting of the idyllic.

The view wasn’t holding the attention of all the other passengers however – especially not the two young children on the seat in front of us who were heading back to Melbourne after visiting their Grandma near Sydney. For them, fun was to be found in flipping the seat rest covers over from their seat to ours and clambering over and under the seat-backs to join us so that we could play dinosaurs. As the friendship grew, so too did the games and Alex left the train covered in dinosaur and train stickers while I was taught how to ‘bake’ on a pink Nintendo DS. We also became friendly with the guy sitting adjacent to us who took over the entertainment duties when we got tired – by the end of the trip he had become known as ‘Duckie Man’, which was shouted by the kids through the carriage very loudly, in case there was anyone who might not have yet heard yet. In return for giving their mum some time to read her book, she gave us some very good tips to get us started in Melbourne (plus some helpful contact numbers) and before long, the city itself was on the horizon and we were slowly snaking around to meet it.

After waving goodbye to the kids, who also gave us a parting present of some of the best shiny heart stickers in their collection, we dragged our bags out of Southern Cross station to the very conveniently located Melbourne Central YHA and looked forward to a shower and bed, falling asleep to the ‘ding’ of the tram bells going by.