The slow boat to China arrived into a fog-filled Shanghai at about midday on Sunday and we sailed through immigration - only to have to wait for nearly an hour for our luggage to be brought off the boat. Definitely not in Japan anymore.

The benefits of not being in Japan were immediately obvious when we took a taxi to our hostel for the pricely sum of £2.20. We stayed near People's Square, about twenty minutes walk from the river front - or at least we would be if the streets were empty. We arrived in China a couple of days before Labour Day (1st May), one of the major public holidays and Shanghai was packed - even more than normal which is saying something for a city of 19 million inhabitants. From the riverside we took the sightseeing tunnel over the river - the Bund Sightseeing tunnel is an interesting concept. It's for people whose attention span is so short they can't manage a 5 minute trip underneath a river without some form of entertainment. And the entertainment is a spectacular light show which reminded me of the trippy section in a 70s TV show or the Scooby Doo cartoons. Very kitsch, and not at all expected.

Shanghai is relentlessly vertical - more so than anywhere else we have ever travelled, and the heart of the skyscrapers is the Pudong district, on the East Bank of the Huangpu river. One again it seemed that the Hyatt chain of hotels had secured all the best bar locations in the Pudong skyscrapers - we elected for drinks in the Jinmao building in the Cloud 9 bar on the lowly 87th floor - compared to the Park Hyatt in the next door which has the highest nightclub in the world on the 92nd floor. Next door to these two buildings the Chinese are busily building the Shanghai Tower, which with 121 floors will become the new tallest building in China (no doubt with it's own Hyatt hotel on the top floors). A couple of champagne cocktails later and Jon decided to drop into the conversation that Chelsea were playing QPR in an hour or so time and he had managed to find a bar in the French Concession that was showing it. His cunning paid off as he was rewarded by them winning 6-1.

We spent a few days trying to get to grips with the business of Shanghai, with trips to the old town (with authentic old Starbucks, Marks and Spencers and H&M), as well as the Yu Gardens, the Urban Planning museum and Shanghai museum (which turned out to be about old art and only held my attention for an hour before I gave up and left Jon to it). One of the features of travelling in China is the hoards of domestic tourists everywhere you go. For such delicate British travellers as ourselves it's a little odd to watch the unorganised and loud nature of the packs of tourists who decend on the main sites with a guide wearing a super loud microphone with no concern about anyone else who was there already. I'm hoping we'll get a bit more used to it as we continue travelling, but at the moment it's hard not to put it in the same category as spitting and squat toilets.

The definite highlight for me of the time we were in Shanghai was when we went to see Era, the show put on by the Shanghai circus. We've been to see a Cirque de Soleil show in Vegas before, but this was the real deal. There were contortionists who could bend ways that can't be natural, but who do it with an elegance and grace that it takes a minute to register exactly what they were doing. There was a strong man who played keepy uppy with a giant heavy vase. My favourites were the troop of male acrobats who did flips through tiny hoops balanced on top of each other 7 feet of the ground, then ran round a giant hamster wheel keeping their balance the whole way, and finally did flips from boards which saw men with stilts fly into the air and do somersaults before landing on the floor on their stilts perfectly. The finale involved a giant spherical cage which they drove motorbikes round - round the edges and then in 360 degree loops. Then they added a second driver who joined in, then a third, then fourth, until there were eight motorbikes riding around in the same cage - all without managing to hit each other. The whole show was gob smacking, and we watched much of it with our mouths hanging open. Definitely worth the ticket admission price and then some.

After five nights in Shanghai we left from Hongqiao railway station, an immense train station to the west of Shanghai (30+ platforms all accessed from one giant single hall), and took a super fast train to Hangzhou, an hour south of Shanghai. We had booked early and were pleasantly surprised to find our first class tickets were right at the front of the train in a special observation carriage with only one other person (and the driver behind a small transparent door). Very exciting.

Lonely Planet describes Hangzhou as having 'dreamy West Lake panoramas and fabulously green and hilly environs [which] can easily lull you into long soujons'. It's not until you read the small print that you realise Hangzhou is a city of 6.16 million people. However our hostel was right along the lakefront, and like our hostel in Shanghai, next to a Ferrari garage, and a few doors down from the Porsche show room.

Many Chinese towns have a west lake, but this one is the original and the best. Consequently, Hangzhou is very popular with domestic tourists, who mostly seem to choose to see the lake by golf buggy. There's a golf buggy about every 5 minutes, sometimes passing in convoy, each requesting that pedestrians get out of the way by blasting out loud electronic Chinese music. That, and the vast crowds of people seeing the lake at the weekend put paid to our plans of hiring bikes so we decided to walk round the lake to get to see it from all angles. We made it round in about four hours, mostly unscathed. We even got to go inside the Chinese pagoda (very unlike the Japanese pagodas we were used to). I think domestic tourists really don't like walking because there were escalators the length of the 200 or so stairs that took you up to the pagoda, and then a lift inside that took you up to the seventh floor.

We were trying to find a restaurant called Grandma's one night and it seemed that the nearest branch was in the city centre so we walked for an hour or so away from the lake into the heart of Hangzhou's downtown. It's probably not seen by many tourists so was nice to get slightly off the beaten track. They are building an entire subway system from scratch in Hangzhou at the moment (due to open later this year) so many of the roads and pavements are dug up, with big civic posters along the side with instructions on how to be a good citizen in Hangzhou. These include 'No smoking in the street' , 'no dirty words', 'no spitting' (hurrah!) and 'Be Frugal and Strive for Self Improvement'. Can't see that catching on at home.

Armed with this knowledge on how to get by in China, we left Hangzhou after a couple of nights to get an overnight train to Yichang, where we would meet our boat for the Three Gorges Cruise down the Yangzi river….