Alison: Kunming is the capital of Yunnan province which is in the south west of China. We have been told that Yunnan province is one of the most beautiful provinces in China but unfortunately we only had enough time to see Kunming. We had an afternoon and one full day there and I'm not too sure we really did it justice. I blame this on being so tired from touring Tibet and travelling almost the length and breadth of China on the train!Day 1 consisted of a KFC...

Nigel: With a quick stop over in Xining, we headed on an overnight train down to Chengdu. The train journey was another long one, 24 hours, and we arrived in to the city late afternoon. The main reason for the stop, other than breaking the journey up, was to see the giant pandas which the city is famous for. To get to the panda sanctuary, you have to take two buses and it took about 1 hr to get there. Depending on when you get there, will depend on whether you wi...

Nigel: The second big train journey which we had planned was the Qinghai-Tibet train line. The journey is famous for being the highest train journey in the world, reaching 5,072m (or 16,636 ft) in parts and, due to the extreme height, oxygen is pumped into the carriages for most of the journey. The train journey takes around 23 hrs and our final destination would be Lhasa,the capital city of Tibet. When we got onto the train, we were pleased to see that our run o...

Nigel - The purpose of our visit to Xining was to acclimatise to the higher altitude which we would experience both in Lhasa and at Mt. Everest base camp. The city is around 2500m above sea level and there is very little to say about it. We were only there for 2 days and as our hostel was a little out of the way we didn't explore much of the city. The part we did see was very industrialised with a lot of construction going on. The most notable part to our vis...

Alison: We arrived in Shanghai on the high speed bullet train from Beijing. Our top speed was just over 300 km/hour and so the journey took only around 4 hours. Shanghai was one of the cities that we visited previously on our first big trip but we wanted to go back because the first time we went, the city was preparing for the World Expo 2010 and so there was a lot of work going on and parts of the Bund were boarded up so we couldn't see it properly. Since we...