It was a case of getting a bus journey of over 5 hours from Fenghuang to Changsha or taking the Maglev high-speed train which took two hours from what, rather optimistically, called itself “Fenghuang high-speed train station”. It took us more than two hours to get to the station; firstly we walked into the town to a station on the short line which ran on a ridge above the town, then rode this train to the end of the line where a jolly lady train official laughed when I asked if this was the Maglev station, She pointed to a little shuttle bus which took us to a bus station where we got onto a bus for quite a long journey to this huge station in the middle of nowhere. We were lucky to get on a Maglev train almost immediately which travelled at up to 196 mph to Changsha, a large city of several million people.
The landscape was unremarkable and I can’t remember much about it. I keep thinking about the robot which sweeps the floors at the hotel in Zhangjiajie. It looked like a dalek (“Exterminate, exterminate”) and had a dicky bow tie and some lapels painted on it. It had a red light which kept flashing when it moved. I first saw it when I was waiting for a lift to come down. The lift doors opened and the robot was standing there. It moved out towards me, stopped until I got out of the way, then turned right and reached an intersection of corridors where it stopped to think before turning left, then right and right again until it reached its little home with charging points. It then turned round and backed into its home. The staff say that they give it a verbal demand to (say) clean Floor 9. It will drive to the lifts, electronically press the button to call a lift, drive into the lift, electronically press the button for Floor 9, drive out, clean the corridor, then come down again the same way. I could have watched it all day.
When we got to the enormous railway station at Changsha, we joined the queue for taxis and asked a taxi driver to take us to a hotel. After howling with laughter he called a railway official over who lead us for the 50 metres to a large modern building with “hotel” written on it. I don’t know its name because it was written in Chinese. It was very cheap and of an excellent standard with a very nice breakfast.