We took an overnight train from Lanzhou to Jiayuguan, travelling in soft sleeper class - an air-conditioned cabin with 4 berths in 2 bunks, i.e. roughly equivalent to 2AC in India but with less legroom and luggage space. This was our first train journey in China and threw up its own mysteries like why is your ticket exchanged for a plastic card at the beginning of the journey and then changed back again at the end, and why is a small mesh pouch provided on the wall of the toilet cubicle so that you can stow your mobile phone while taking care of business yet nothing is done to prevent said toilet being seemingly hit by a diarrhoea bomb after about 10 minutes of travel. The table in the cabin bore a vase and flower, as ... read more

No-one seemed to know if the daily direct bus to Xiahe would be running, so we took the less risky option of first going to Hezuo, where reputedly there were several onward connections. We'd both noticed the scent of vomit in the air and, several minutes later when we'd both started to feel dampness in our trousers, investigations revealed that someone must have been sick in both our seats but had cleaned it up just enough to i) make the seats visually indistinguishable from clean ones, and ii) make it hard to tell where the smell was coming from. At Hezuo we mysteriously had to go to another bus station, despite the fact that there were several buses present in the one we'd arrived at with Xiahe on their destination cards. The 10 minute journey across ... read more

When the bus left Songpan bus station we were the only 2 passengers on it and, on arriving in Jiuzhaigou, we immediately found a dirt-cheap suite equipped with a futuristic multi-jet shower featuring a radio and array of blue lights. I couldn't help suspecting the gods had given us this good luck because of an impending shafting. Like many areas of natural beauty, Jiuzhaigou did not look its best with drizzle and overcast skies. Such was our fate for much of our 2 days there. The park is one of the most expensive attractions in all of China - quite possibly THE most expensive, as a cursory flick through the RG showed that it comfortably exceeded the entry fees of more famous sights such as the Terracotta Warriors. There is a hop on/hop off bus service ... read more

Sanxingdui lies about 30km north-east of Chengdu and is the site of a museum chronicling extraordinary archaeological discoveries made there 20 years ago. Excavations revealed a settlement of the Ba-Shu culture, a Bronze Age people whose level of advancement challenged the conventional ideas of Chinese civilisation having arisen in the north of the country. Apart from finely carved pottery and tools, they also created startling bronzes including masks with leering grins and eyes on stalks, strange figures with oversized hands, "trees" with birds on them, and some alien gold masks. No other mention of this civilisation has ever been found. We also visited Huanglongxi, a town 40km south of Chengdu and famed for its Qing dynasty streets lined with wooden shops - it also featured in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon". However I found it inferior to ... read more

Chengdu brought increases in both temperature and casualness - for the first time in China, I saw many guys walking around in shorts. The city had a similar feel to Kunming, with umpteen Western brands, foreign cuisines, and bustling shopping zones though a good deal more greenery. There was a lot to see both inside and outside the city (so much so that I'll write 3 entries for it) and - despite an expat population of over 3,000 - we were still clearly a novelty item. Wenshu Yuan was the first Zen Buddhist temple I'd been to on this trip and the vegetarian restaurant there served us up good but enormous portions. A local couple at our table unsubtly took photos of me using their mobile phone. The neighbouring street was full of souvenir shops and ... read more