The distance between here and Guangzhou is far enough that, were I to buy a 2-hour slow-train ticket to a city with a high-speed connection with Guangzhou, it would be another 5 hours on the train to get there. My personal limit for being in train seats without a transfer of stations is around 3½ hours so, even before factoring in just how much cheaper it is, I'm perfectly fine with taking the overnight train.

Of course, that's when I thought I was getting a sleeper berth.

Which—because I didn't understand how the multi-choice option for "snatch an officially unavailable ticket¹" works², and because all the onboard upgrades are sold out—I'm not doing.

My cheap hotel room is of the windowless variety so this morning's lollygagging is as much about getting in some extra hours of completely uninterrupted sleep as it is about reorganizing the two panniers I took up to the room into "things going with me to Guangzhou" and "things staying in the Leping bike shop".

Coffee at the bike shop followed by some of the worst fried noodles³ I've eaten in Asia from a nearby restaurant, I head to the train station with plenty of time to spare, which is good because they're completely flummoxed by a passport, can't find my ticketing data anywhere in the system, and will eventually just instruct the person manning the turnstiles that I'm to go through the manual gate.

For this train, which possibly has an overloaded air conditioner rather than a broken one, I've got a standing-room ticket. Costing the same as tickets with seats, these are the absolute worst. Luckily for me, a woman who is taking three seats for herself and a toddler too small to be a ticketed passenger mishears me in the din and thinks one of the seats is assigned to me rather than my just asking if the sleeping boy could be moved partially onto her lap.

Five or six years ago, such a gambit—had it been intentional—would not have been possible. These days, however, you have to explicitly request a paper ticket instead of something on your phone, so the general assumption by most civilized people⁴ to "someone is asking me about the seat I know I wasn't assigned" is "I should move".

Two-hour transfer at the Yingtan Station, they once again can't figure out how to do anything with a passport or where to look up my data, but I've got a text message that says I'm on that train so I obviously must be on that train. I speak and read and write Chinese and I've been through enough train stations in this country that I didn't need a staff member to escort me to my correct waiting room at a pace 3× faster than I want to walk while burdened with an awkward-shaped pannier as my luggage, but even if it wasn't actually helpful, I appreciate the sentiment of wanting to help me.

Other than it being in the very last car and thus a very, very far walk along the platform, I've got what counts as a pretty good seat. Window-side with something to lean against, I'm also close enough to the bathrooms that getting up to pee only means climbing over and around five or six unlucky folks who didn't get seats. 

I get on this train just past 6 pm and get off again just before 6 am.

I'm 'couchsurfing'⁵ in a company-owned apartment with one of the senior managers of a restaurant chain that's about to open a location in Haikou and whose GM graciously agreed to let Tyra mail him my clothing and shoes for the 4th-of-July party that I'm determined not to be underdressed for the way I was in 2018⁶.

Despite having eventually passed out at least once or twice while on the train, I'm so groggy and disoriented that one of the few things I remember from my detraining and arrival at the apartment is saying that I'm likely to wake up having no idea where I am or how I got there.

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¹ A seat sold from Point A to Point F out of the A to L Block will result in that seat initially being marked unavailable. However, you can pay a small fee to have the system look for canceled tickets or to see if there are any of these types of seats left for the segment(s) you are traveling.

² I thought picking "hard seat" and "hard sleeper" and paying for sleeper meant it would keep trying to find me a hard sleeper. Instead, as soon as my ticket was issued, it refunded me the difference and stopped querying the database. Then, because I now had a ticket for this date and train, and one person obviously can't have two spaces at the same time, the only way to restart the sleeper query would be to cancel the ticket I'd just gotten with no guarantee I'd be able to get it again.

³ Reminiscent of hotel breakfast buffet noodles, they remind me of the "Fujianese Noodles" I had at the night market in Port Arthur.

⁴ Obviously, you still get the occasional viral video of a mosaic-faced passenger-in-the-wrong yelling first at the person whose seat it is, then at the conductor, then at the transit police. 

⁵ "Roommate is out of town" spare-bedroom surfing

⁶ The year no one believed the consulate actually meant the "casual" on the invitation and therefore all dressed Very Formal.