Fenghuang - A Charming Riverside Town

After the bus trip from Dali we checked in for one night at The Hump Hostel before catching the train to Huaihua the following day.  At The Hump we bumped into an American guy, Benny, who arrived at the same time by train from Dali and who is now our friend.  He was lovely.  He recognised us from The Jade’s barbecue and pool night.  Although he had been staying elsewhere in Dali, he had been persuaded to join in the pool completion and I somehow remembered it was mentioned that he was from Wisconsin.  It’s strange the details you remember you have eavesdropped about other people!

Dali - Warm days and Cheese on Toast




The bus journey to Dali took us through stunning Yunnan countryside – if we had caught the train we suspect we would have missed much of the scenery as when we took the train from Kunming to Lijiang, passing through Dali on the way, the train seemed to spend 90% of the journey in tunnels.  However, the road through the mountains south from Lijiang to Dali was beautiful, marred only by a peppering of heart stopping moments. 

Lijiang - A Quaint Old Town and The Forgery Incident

We arrived in Lijiang after dark.  The railway station is about 15km from the old town where we had booked accommodation.  We caught a taxi no problem and headed through the new city before being dropped off at the east gate to the old town.  Luckily Paul seemed to have some idea where we were going.  Motor vehicles (and horse and carts apparently) are not allowed within the old town so we had to wander through the winding cobbled streets in the dark to try and find our hostel with our heavy rucksacks on our backs.

Kunming - Parks and Markets

It was raining when we arrived in Kunming and we couldn’t get a taxi to take us to the hostel for love nor money.  I don’t know why but they just wouldn’t take us – they didn’t even try to rip us off, they just refused!  And we couldn’t find the public bus that was supposed to take us there so we were a bit stuck.  That was until a random bloke came up to us and offered to take us for 40 yuan which is about double what it should be but we were desperate, and £4 is nothing compared to an hour’s walk with a heavy rucksack, and our principles are a little hazy – quite frankly £4 could probably feed his family for a week and it wasn't going to break our budget so we gladly accepted his offer.

Chengdu and the Pandas

It was with some relief that we checked into Sims Cozy Garden Hostel after the last four hotels and their rock hard beds.  China does not do comfortable beds at all and, to be fair, while the hostels are hardly luxury, you do get about 3 inches of comfort between you and the bed base which, when you get to our age, can be the difference between being able to walk in the morning unaided or being laid up with a bad back for a week!

Lanzhou and Xiahe - The Tibetan Monastery

Our lasting impression of Lanzhou is that it is a place to avoid at all costs.  If I can dispense one piece of advice about China it would be that if you ever have to visit Lanzhou (which is possible as it is a major transport hub), plan very carefully, book ahead and spend as little time as you have to there,  It's horrible.

We arrived in Lanzhou from Dunhuang in the hope that we would be able to catch a train straight out to Chengdu and start our journey slowly south.  No such luck.  We had accepted we would have to stay one night so had booked into a hotel opposite the train station.  Again, our room was almost identical to the rooms at the hotels in Dunhuang and Jiayuguan:  completely devoid of character, the same rock hard beds but with the added disadvantage of being located in a city with about as much charm as Basingstoke.

Dunhuang - The Oasis Town

We were still craving cheese, and added to that list was a good old fry up and a roast dinner!  But I digress.

The bus journey from Jiayuguan took about 5 hours and was interesting, if a little nerve wracking at times!  Our preferred method of travel is train as it is largely considered quite safe and you generally won’t go wrong on two rails.  Four wheels, with a 2 or 3 lane road to zoom around on, and a horn seems to give the driver a lot more options and sometimes you think just a bit too much freedom to drive where and how he likes! 

Jiayuguan Fort - The End of Civilisation

It was about now that we really started to crave cheese.  We hadn’t been able to get any proper cheese since Russia (and calling Russian cheese proper is probably stretching it a bit).  We started fantasising about crumbly cheddar, deep fried camembert, a nice stilton with some hot crusty bread spread with lots of salty butter (another thing you can’t seem to get in China).  Don’t get me wrong the food is amazing, but we love cheese and we miss it.  A lot.

Xi'an - and the flowerpot men

For the first couple of days we thought that Xi’an was China’s equivalent of Birmingham.  We were staying in a lovely hostel within the city walls, with an amazing roof garden, but our first impressions of the city were that it was just a dirty (not helped by the appalling pollution), very westernised (mobile phone shops everywhere), unappealing place.  

It was also very polluted for much of our time there, and we viewed an alien sun through a sickly grey haze.

Pingyao - An Ancient Walled City

The train journey to Pingyao from Beijing was without incident.  We had booked hard sleepers and would point out at this stage that a hard sleeper on Chinese trains, whilst perfectly adequate for an overnight trip, is exactly what is says it is.  It is a sleeper and it is hard.  Soft sleepers are one step up in the luxury stakes and we were to find that these are slightly less hard, but only slightly.

Beijing - National Holiday Madness

For the National Holiday on 1st October the hostel arranged a special evening – lots of food and all the beer you could drink for 60 yuan (£6).  The menu sounded delicious, and included chicken, pork and beef dishes along with roast duck. We reckoned we would get our value for money in beer alone whatever happened (beer was 50p a shot!).  We decided to splash out.

There were only about a dozen people from the hostel who took up this generous offer:  a young Sweden couple, a German girl, and an Australian lady (both travelling alone), and a few French and Belgians.