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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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 [View Full Entry]

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Our visit to the Giant Panda Breeding Research Base will no doubt be one of the highlights of my entire trip - I'd be really surprised if going all the way out to Wolong gave a better experience. We saw pandas ranging in age from less than 1 year old to mature adults, all either dozing or chomping on bamboo in a variety of relaxing positions, the favourite one being lying on their back munching away, with discarded bamboo husks all around and fresh supplies a lazy paw's reach away. It's hardly surprising that they're endangered as, in the wild, they [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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The RG had said that tickets to Kangding only went on sale at 2:30PM the day before travel - the fact that our tickets, purchased on the dot, only got us seats in the second of 2 minibuses that were laid on in addition to the main bus made me suspect that that wasn't true. It was a cold and smoky journey on bumpy roads. The first part of the journey was climbing out of Litang's valley via a 4,700m pass, where we saw a large yak herd plodding across the hillside like wildebeest over the Serengeti, then through some misty [View Full Entry]

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The bus trip to Litang was disappointing in that we were subject to allocated seating for the first time (meaning we were ejected from the prime seats we'd nabbed and ended up near the back of the bus). Movies played constantly throughout the journey, but before midday we'd arrived and checked in to the Crane Guesthouse, which did laundry with a 4 hour turnaround. The Tibetan influence in Litang is very clear, in terms of longer hairstyles, clothing, facial hair, many cowboy hats (a great combo when in conjunction with shades and a motorbike), decorated motorbikes (with hardly a moped in [View Full Entry]

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The 9 hour bus trip to Xiangcheng was a trial, with the first 7 and a bit hours being on an unsurfaced road that was bumpy as hell. One bonus was that there was a driver-enforced smoking ban. Our chosen guesthouse had no laundry facilities (and it subsequently turned out that was the case for the entire town) so I had to resurrect long-unused handwashing skills. The guesthouse was also something of a fly trap, so I had some fun with a flip-flop before realising it was a losing battle. Since the RG language section is only 15 pages in a [View Full Entry]

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