Trials and Tibetulations: An invitation to Tibet - 3600km by train - the Forbidden City - 1200km by jeep - Everest - Buddha - the roof of the World. Make yourself a cuppa and sit tight - this is 7 Steps in Tibet and it's a long one! --- Step 1 'Little pig, little pig, let me in' - First things first. Its leading spiritual figure and for many true political leader, the Dalai Lama, isn't even allowed into Tibet, so what chance have foreigners got? To protect...

It does make a blind bit of difference (an N-Co production) - One of my not-so-hidden agendas for The Great Escape is to have as many massages as I can. Partly for the thrill of having a massage at 11am on a Wednesday morning whilst listening to the waves crashing on the shore. Partly to experience many different styles of massage. Partly to have an hour to myself away from Lonely Planets, mountain treks and The Beard. And partly cos I just love them. For mere p...

Our Chinese Takeaways - Peking Jim and Sassy Con's 20 Hot Facts about China: 1. The food is amazing. And amazingly spicy too. Yunnan and Sichuan provinces' food rocks (apart from anything made with yak butter and anything for sale at a "service station"). 2. The locals order a LOT of it. A couple (the girl being as tiny as a bird) will order a large tray of spicy chicken, two plates of additional "meats", a casserole bowl of soup, two types of green leafy veget...

Crazy China Caught on Camera - 您好/ Ni hao / Hello - For the last three weeks, we've been road-tripping via the less-trodden path from Kunming in South Yunnan (you'll remember this as TV-2Ladders) to Chengdu in West Sichuan (this is where baby pandas live), via Lijiang, Shangri-La, Kangding, Tagong and DanBa. The Chinese government decided to close parts of the Kham region to foreigners ("politics"), meaning we couldn't do our planned overland loop from Shan...

Tiger Leaping Gorgeous - Tennessee Williams may have said that "time is the longest distance between two places" but we disagree. It's quite clear that the start and end points of the 28 Bends section of the Tiger Leaping Gorge trail is the longest distance between two places. In the whole world. Or so it felt like last Wednesday afternoon as we were halfway through the first day of our four-day trek in China's Northwest Yunnan province (test your geogr...