Nic and Dan

So it’s the eve of my last full day in China (not counting all my upcoming airport time!) and I realise the blog has been a bit neglected. We encountered a bit of internet frustration since the last post so I’ve decided to give you now a quick snap shot of what we’ve been up to then when I get back home I will back post with all the glorious details. After our restful stop at Heaven Lake we had another night back in Urumqi before catching an overnight sleeper train (we paid a commission to make sure we could get tickets) to Kashgar/Kashi. Amazingly remote and as un-Chinese as you could imagine. I’ll hold all the good stuff for later but basically we spent 3 days wandering around the old city, full of mosques and ... read more

Not sure if it was a donkey or horse cart that we climbed upon to ride around the town this evening but it was a funny way to finish a very interesting but very hot day which apparently reached 46 degrees! We started the day at 8am Beijing time which unofficially is 6am local time. The whole country is forced to operate on the one time zone which means the sun doesn’t go down here until around 10pm and it stays really hot right up until then. So first on our agenda was Tu Yu Gou a small traditional Uighur village (Western Chinese minority descendent from Turkish traders) built out of mud bricks and covered in grape vines and mulberry bushes to keep cool. It has long been a pilgrimage site for devout Muslims and is ... read more

After a quite pleasant and normal 5 hour bus ride we arrived in the desert town of Dunhuang. The trip from Jiauyugaun was spectacular as we had the front seats of the bus and an unobstructed view of the expansive mountains and desert sands in front, the further west we drove the hotter it got outside and by the end the whole road was pretty much a mirage. Our guesthouse was 10 minutes out of town at the very base of the giant sand dunes for which Dunhuang is famed. Nested amongst the trees we had our own little log cabin with a verandah and hammocks outside and we could hear the camels not far away waiting to take people up the dunes. On our first evening we went the short distance into town which actually ... read more

So remember a while ago there was a news story about a week long traffic jam in China.....we now know how they would have felt and are retracting our earlier statement about the superiority of Chinese sleeper buses! Lets back track a few hours and describe our bus journey for you. After Dani slammed her finger between the two solid metal oversized doors at the hotel and Dumb & Dumber receptionist just stared at the blood streaming down her arm, we hurried off to the station with not enough time to stock up on food for what we thought would be a 12h journey. At the station We were pleasantly surprised to be personally escorted to our bus only then to be shocked by the sight of it. In much worse condition than our previous bus ... read more

We originally planned our trip across China by train. With the combination of the Chinese love of train travel, a massive floating population, and the peak of summer holidays train tickets have become a rarity, selling out mulitple trains within the first hour of opening. This forced us to change some plans and to take buses from Xi'an until we arrive in Urumqi. Luckily for most of these journeys the bus journey is only slightly longer...apparently. So our first bus from Xi'an to Lanzhou and we were somewhat excited and nostalgic remembering a very funny and terrifying sleeper bus nearly four years ago through the south of Laos. We were anxious to know how the Chinese experience would compare. Good point to note, we weren't two people crammed into a largish 'single'bed this time and instead ... read more