A taxi ride, a plane flight, a bus ride, a taxi ride, a train ride, and an underground ride over the course of 6 hours took us from Xi'an to Hong Kong via Shenzhen. I can't deny experiencing a sense of relief being back in a familiar place with no language issues and access to a world of handerchiefs. I think this was an even stronger feeling for LA Woman as this was her first visit to Hong Kong and she probably hadn't imagined there'd be such a contrast between it and the mainland. One thing that was immediately apparent was [View Full Entry]

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Our trip to Xi'an was a slog, though I won't arouse any sympathy when I say we went soft-sleeper. The first leg of the journey was overnight from Dunhuang to Lanzhou. We had the pleasant surprise of a compartment to ourselves and also tried out the dining car, where we were the only occupants not ignoring the "No Smoking" signs and were lucky that another passenger helped us to decipher the handwritten hanzi menu. At Lanzhou, LA Woman was hoping to find a Poste Restante package from home but unfortunately it seemed to have gone astray in the Chinese postal system. [View Full Entry]

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Though the aircon on the bus to Dunhuang was non-existent, it was gratifying to see the landscape changing more to the type of desert I'm familiar with - flat expanses of sand and scrub like the Outback or Saudi. Dunhuang hotels that looked similar to the places we'd been staying in recently were all charging twice as much, and we ended up in a hotel that was a sensible price but rather stuffy due to the noisy but weedy portable A/C unit. There were several reasons why we'd come to Dunhuang, the most pressing being that we needed to extend our [View Full Entry]

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A hot and monotonous bus journey got us to Hami, and the initial response we got at the PSB seemed to indicate we weren't going to get a flat-out rejection. After waiting around in one building for half an hour, we were given a lift to another one (conveniently closer to our hotel) by an unsmiling man whose shake of the head and glance at the clock when he looked through my passport started to create doubts in my mind as to whether we were going to have some success. He led us to a seating area and then presented me [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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As we travelled from Xiahe to Lanzhou, the scenery changed from tree-covered mountains and sloping pasturelands to scrubby hills where brown was the dominant colour. The religious landscape also changed with many more skull caps, crescent moons, and minarets in evidence. I'd never thought of China as having much of a Muslim population, but apparently it wasn't only goods that came along the Silk Road - there are millions of Muslim Chinese, predominantly in the northwest of the country. Unfortunately the clear, crisp air of the mountains was also replaced with a polluted haze that was quite possibly the worst quality [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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It wasn't possible to head direct to Langmusi, so we first bussed to Zoige then on from there. Unlike most other places in the Far East, it's illegal to overfill buses here and this seems to be enforced by the police with some degree of rigour. However it doesn't stop drivers from cramming in another couple of passengers if possible - it just means that whenever a police car is seen, or when approaching locations such as toll booths where police are more likely to be lurking, the extra passengers have to crouch in the stairwell or even in spare leg-space [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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Our bus to Songpan turned out to actually be a bus to Jiuzhaigou (a famous national park) and we were the only 2 people on it not going all the way through to the end. This may have been why the driver decided not to stop at Songpan bus station, which we only realised when a kind soul pointed out we'd gone through Songpan and out the other side. The subsequent burst of Mandarin from the driver carried the implication that we should have told him to stop, however that seemed a little unreasonable as this was our first time in [View Full Entry]

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