I'd never actually wondered why my memory of the train station I emerged from in February 2004 when I arrived in Guangzhou from Hong Kong didn't match up with the main station that I've used for every other train trip in or out of the city over the past 19 years.

However, as discovered after a needlessly frantic¹ transfer to the correct station, it's because Guangzhou has more than one train station. Has, in fact, five train stations.

I started the day with a lovely dairy-capped² coffee beverage called a Floating Cloud Americano followed by a substantially less lovely³ lunch buffet at the only African restaurant I could easily find on maps before getting a very scary moto-taxi⁴ from the restaurant to the train station via a warren of back roads and shortcuts.

Power walk my way through security glad that I've included a bunch of my non-bike clothing in the parcel I've forwarded on to the town where I'll be doing something with the national media in a little over a week, then power walk my way back again already starting to drip sweat and smell like stress.

Things went pretty smooth after I arrived at the right station. No problems with my passport. No problems finding the right waiting area. No problems with getting through the turnstiles with time enough to board the train.

In fact, the only problem I really had was at the transfer station because twenty years after the decommissioning of the last train car to dump human waste direct from the on-board toilet to the tracks, they still lock the bathrooms coming in to cities and I was fit to burst.

Similarly in need of a pee (and desperately in need of a shower), I handed my passport off to the same front desk lady who figured it out a week ago and begged to have my room key now rather than waiting for her to finish my registration.

Tomorrow, I resume biking.

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¹ Needless because I'm one of those people who shows up and spends two of three hours in the waiting room.

² They swore it was just milk but you don't get that consistency without adding something to the milk.

³ Read: "Barely edible"

⁴ I'm used to wimpy e-bikes with speed governors as moto-taxis. This was not that.