Arrived in X'ian at around 10am and took the bus to Jin Cheng Hotel. The weather was wet and cold but the city looked very nice. It still has the ancient walls surrounding the city and is one of few where these have survived. After a short orientation walk in the rain we grabbed some food and had a sleep as we were so tired from the train journey (they turn on all lights at 6am). At 6:30 the group met for dinner in the Muslim Quarter. It turned out to be the ...

This morning we met at 7o'clock for our 3 hour drive to the Jingshanling section of the Great Wall. We had heard it was swarming with tourists but luckily for us Intrepid organises trips to lesser-known places so it was just our group for the entire walk. It lasted about 5 hours and was really difficult at parts. It began with a 30minute walk up a steep hill to reach the wall and our guide was not one for hanging around! It was very steep up and down, with fl...

Wednesday 23rd May Today we went to Beijing Zoo and Aquarium. The books said it wasn't very good but we enjoyed it! We paid about 7quid eachfor both attractions but then they charge extra for the pandas and the penguins, anything to squeeze more money out of tourists! he zoo was huge, we were knackered before we had seen everything, the massive aquarium is even within the zoo grounds. We went to Outback for dinner and ate far too much food and had too many cockt...

Early rise for our day of flying! We went from kathmandu to Lhasa to Chengdu to beijing. After check-in at Kathmandu we went through several security checks. If the machine beeps they frisk you, if the machine doesn't beep, they still frisk you! Same with our bags, they searched them a couple of times. When we walked out of the terminal to the plane we were asked to identify our liggage out of hundreds of bags scattered across the tarmac and getthe guy to put...

We spent our last 2 days in Kathmandu meeting up with friends before we left for beijing on Sunday. We did some last minute shopping and sent home a parcel (which was really expensive) On saturady evening we went to Paddy Foleys Irish pub (again!) for the FA Cup Final. It was packed with bloody united fans, only about 4 Chelsea Still I hung my blue flag and clapped and cheered on my beloved blues, much to the annoyance of the reds! And when we scored, holy crap, ...