Having been to 3 major cities in China it was time to explore the countryside, so in Hong Kong we booked a flight to Yunnan, a province in south west China bordering Tibet. We flew up to Kunming (the capital of the province) and then got a bus to Dali. The next morning we headed further north to Shangri-La, which is the beginning of Tibetan world at 3200m, and chilled there for a couple of days. The drive up was great, lots of rice fields, corn fields and other r...

We spent a couple of days in Shanghai, it's another huge city and appears to be not short of cash. There's a lot of development, construction and some huge impressive buildings. Our first day was spent getting our train tickets to Hong Kong (we queued in 4 different places before we got our tickets!) Then we went to People's Square (like Times Square). There's a nice little park there and we were approached by a Chinese couple who were students. After a bit of ...

Our final Trans Mongolian journey took us from UB to Beijing, around 1500Km; this took 30 hours with about a 5 hour border crossing. I don't think I mentioned before that every kilometer is marked out at the side of the track…..just in case you're really bored you can keep an eye on your progress. At the border the Mongolian and Chinese health officials came on to check no one had swine flu symptoms. The Chinese also had a thermometer to take everyone's forehea...