The bus picked us up at 6am and then drove around Beijing for the next 45 minutes picking other people up. It took us about 3 hours to drive to Jinshanling where our 10 km trek along the The Great Wall of China to Simatai began. On the way there were a few heavy showers and the sky was pretty dark, we had left our coats back at the hostel because we were not expecting rain, the weather has been lovely the last few days. When we arrived in Jinshanling it was overc...

We arrived in Beijing, blurry eyed about 8am and got a cab from the train station to our hostel, whicj was lazy but it was really reasonable and we even got a printed receipt showing distance, time etc. pretty funny! After unpacking into a lovely double room we went for a walk to explore the area. Tiannamen Square is only a 10 minute walk away. It is the biggest public square in the world, there are hundreds of tourists there but still it is mainly open space! ...

We arrived in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, lunchtime on Wednesday and our first thoughts were "oh dear what are we doing here!!" We have definately had it easy in China up to this point! There were no other Westerners or English speakers around and I think we are a rarity by the 4 deep crowd that surrounded us whilst we were trying to get a taxi to take us to a hostel! Our first choice hostel which according to the Lonely Planet was opposite the train sta...

We arrived very early in Datong, yet again our train was on time - so far the Chinese trains have all been on time so we have been very impressed. On the way out of the train station a chinese man that had been staring at us (well probably Sarah) walked straight into somebodys suitcase and fell over - it was really funny! Made us laugh anyway, it can get quite intimidating at times everyone staring at you, and they do quite a lot, some have even crashed their bic...

We left Xi'an by bus, which turned out to be one of the most easy and comfortable journeys we have had for a long time. Although the Chinese can be perseved as quite a rude nation, at times they can be so friendly and helpful, especially those who speak a little English. We had brought our bus ticket in advance, luckily the woman in the ticket booth spoke English, so we just had to find out which bus we needed to get on. After showing our tickets to a couple of p...