The approach of Chinese New Year was obvious. Shops started stocking up on specialty goodies – bagged or boxed sets of everything from sweets and chocolates to coffee and tea to vacuum-sealed meats. All in festive red packaging. People headed home laden with bags and boxes to take to the family gatherings. Also lots of banners and scrolls for pasting over gates and doorways, red lanterns (fold out paper ones reminding me of the Christmas bells common when I was a kid, or silk cloth ones) and of course the red envelopes for the children's money. People bought new clothes at the many sales and stocked up on food. Every few hundred metres there were tables set up on footpaths and in markets, piled with fireworks for sale – very tempted. Sporadic letting off of fireworks grew daily.

The road works below us closed down and the tent city disappeared. Workers were seen loading cases, trunks, boxes and bags into taxis and mini buses presumably heading to the railway station. Gradually more and more students were seen loading their gear into taxis or trundling cases off down the hill away from the university. The campus and our building got progressively quieter. The number of streetsellers declined and many of the small shops and businesses closed their shutters.

We left Lanzhou for our holiday nine days before new year so we didn’t see how it was celebrated there, but as we left for the airport we passed some truly amazing decorations along the river foreshore parks at the eastern end of town – an area we’d missed in our long walks. I was dying to stop the bus and jump out and take lots of photos.

After our week on Hainan, we’d opted to fly to Nanning on New Years Eve – cheaper fares – arriving mid evening, in time to get to the hotel and check in before the midnight fireworks took off, and treated ourselves to a river view room to take in the spectacle without having to venture into the cold. This we did, having a great view out the window, while keeping one eye on the last bit of the annual New Year’s Eve TV show. It was very enjoyable but not the big spectacle of Beijing we saw last year, when the hotel lobby lounge was set up with a big screen and chairs and nibbles for guests to watch the special TV show and staff set off a luggage cart load of fireworks in the street out front. Then the incessant fireworks went off day and night – and were still going off when we arrived in Shanghai a few days later. Definitely a quieter spring festival for us this year. New Year’s Day there were crackers going off and lion dances outside restaurants and shops all round town, and we came across several spots with people busily mopping up after the cracker litter had caught fire.

The official holiday ended last weekend and the travel chaos finally caught up with us. We had to stay an extra night in Nanning then take the overnight hard sleeper to Kunming as the trains were so heavily booked. The "hard sleeper" was actually very comfortable – in fact softer than most of the hotel beds, Chinese beds being notoriously rock hard. They were in open-ended six bunk compartments, and we had the middle bunks which were reasonably accessible, but with not enough headroom to sit up and not enough light to read it was off to sleep pretty early. Just as well as we arrived in Kunming before 5.30am.

Kunming is a pleasant provincial capital and we’re enjoying clear blue skies and sunshine. Although the official holiday is finished, the spring festival period goes for 15 days till the lantern festival begins.