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...

Nigel: We had already been to China before and our first destination in China, on our previous travel, was also Beijing. We wanted to return to see if/how much the city and the area we stayed in had changed. We booked the same hostel as previous to try and relive the experience. The hostel is situated in one of the several Hutong's in Beijing and the area has changed a lot. It has got more commercialised and there are many new shops plying their trade along t...

Nigel: Our final destination in Russia was a place called Ulan Ude (UU) which is the biggest city before crossing the border into Mongolia. The appeal of UU was that it has a very Asian feel even though you are still in Russia. To get get to UU you have to take "another train journey" from Irkutsk which takes 7 hours in total. As it is easier to put all foreigners in one carriage (for border crossing purposes) we were with a large German tour group who seemed t...