So here we are in Shanghai, our last stop in China. Six weeks have passed frighteningly quickly and it is only a matter of weeks until my four-month-long trip will be over, tempus fugit!

Last time I wrote I was in Pingyao. Although charming at first, after spending a few days there, it began to feel like a toy town. One day we even saw a man dressed as mickey mouse wander down the street, waving at the children and stopping to pose for photos... It was all just rather bizarre. So we left Pingyao feeling ready, and incredibly excited to move onto Beijing, China's capital city.

We had the most amazing time in Beijing. It is such an impressive city; absolutely enormous, thoroughly diverse and completely enchanting. Our very comfortable hostel was located in Dongcheng, right beside the (highly efficient) subway which we used to travel everywhere. Unlike the London Underground, choosing the right exit, never mind the right stop is vital as the distances between stops is definitely not walkable... I can't tell you just how big a city it is! We manouvered our sightseeing plans around the weather forecast; wanting to spend the best day possible on the Great Wall of China. So when the much-awaited "Great Wall day" arrived, we awoke early, pulled on shorts and a t-shirt, lathered up on suncream and loaded up on water for the day. We definitely jinxed the weather; the 27o heat and good visibility we were expecting was instead replaced by typical Scottish beach weather i.e. cold, grey and misty... Typical. Despite the weather, our day on the Great Wall was incredible. We got the chairlift up, walked the longer stretch from watchtowers 6-23 and then got the toboggan down, which was surprisingly speedy and, needless to say, hilarious! In hind sight we are actually thankful that it was misty- it made it all so much more atmospheric... Every cloud has a silver lining... Literally! We spent the rest of our time in Beijing taking in the obvious; the Forbidden City, Tiannamen Square, the Summer Palace whilst also spending afternoons wandering around the 798 Art District, the very swanky Sanlitun, Houhai lake or simply getting lost in the Hutongs! Despite spending 6 jam-packed days there, there's still so much left to do that we didn't manage to fit in. This combined with the fact that it is simply such a cool city; has left us both with a fervent desire to return ASAP.

From Beijing, we took a high speed train (we travelled the length of China in 6 hours) to the beautiful city of Hangzhou, our penultimate stop in China. The city has been elected the best Chinese city to live in, and rightly so; sitting on the glistening West Lake on which one side is city, and the other is hazy mountains, it is breathtakingly beautiful. We spent four lazy days there, reading our books beside the lake, renting boats, visiting night markets and watching plenty of sunsets. The weather was amazingly kind to us and on a particularly sunny day we spontaneously decided to rent a tandem. What seemed like a fantastic idea at the time, quickly turned into a bit of a disaster. In the few hours we had the ominous bike, we managed to cycle through a pedestrianised area (entailing a very public humiliation from a rather outraged and out-of-breath policeman), have a mild collision and cause our chain to derail, meaning we had to travel ridiculously slowly in order to stop the precariously replaced chain from falling off again. So we hastily returned the tandem, sheepishly trying to hide our oil-covered hands...

A surprisingly quick and easy journey from Hangzhou meant we arrived in Shanghai anticipating a twist of fate (our train journeys thus far have never been that straight forward... We must finally be getting the hang of it!). Shanghai is an amazingly cosmopolitan megacity- it's fast pace seems to be maintained throughout both day and night. Parts are astoundingly futuristic yet other areas have maintained their classic Shanghainese traditions. It is developing at a break-neck speed- I have never heard people talk about their own city's development in such a matter of fact way- purely because it is a such a tangeable part of their daily lives. The city's skyline has all emerged in only the last 20 years- It's crazy to think that when I was born, the majority of the buildings you see from the bund didn't even exist. As Alice and I had, prior to our arrival, seen Shanghai as a rushed pitstop before Fiji- we were not expecting to be so bowled over by it. Our time was spent here absorbing the city; from the street food to the designer malls- we feel we've had a real taste of Shanghai life.

As I write this, Alice is setting our alarm for early tomorrow morning in order to to catch our connection flight to Hong Kong before our flight to Fiji later in the afternoon. Our time in China has been just incredible. We have experienced such diversity; from the karst mountains of Yangshuo to the nighttime view from the Shanghai Bund- we have had a taste of an impressive variety of cultures, people and landscapes. We have learnt something new everyday; from the odd phrase in Mandarin to the knack of becoming a mean bargainer; the history of some of the Chinese dynasties, to officially mastering chopsticks...! China has most certainly opened our eyes; yet there is still so much of it out there for us to explore. We'll just have to come back...! For now, however, we bid a fond "zai jian" to China, for the white sandy beaches and Fijian rays are beckoning...

JHJ