Hay, just going to do a breif summary of Zhong Wei.

Basically tiny place! only 100,000 people live here, which in china terms is kinda small. The main reason to come here though was to go inton the desert. Never thought the first time i spent the night in a desert would be in China, but there you go. So yesterday we all experienced most of our first times on a camel. Not all that comfy let me tell you! Theres such a massive rocking movement that you've got to get used to. My camel was also the one at the back (they were joined together) so as the last of six he (i named him, eric) had to run quite alot to catch up and going across steep slops thats kinda intersting. There were several times i thought i was going to fall off because my bum would come right of the seat. You can only hold on with you hands on a bar in front of you, no stirups so you dont have much stability when you go in the air! Because i was bumping around so much (4 hours of camel riding on the way there) i did unfortunatly get pretty nasty back pains, but should be all goo soon. One plus point, the camels didn't spit! Although they did poo and fart quite abit, quite a potent smell! But we got to the desert and set up camp and had a barbaque and a massive fire. Also got taught a new drinking game. Unfortuntly i didn't join in because i had had a dodgy stomach, what a shame! Basically the camel guys taught us it. Rock paper sicssors, best out of three loser had to drink. But it ment that he drank alot as he played agomst everyone, on rice wine its pretty leathal!

I did forget actually yesterday before the camels we had another interesting animal exprience, goat skin rafting. The actual goat skin was inflated (with legs and neck still visible) and wood placed across it. A pretty relaxing time coasting down the yellow river for a couple of hours watching the scenary go by. I think the most memorable part however was went the rafter at the end had to re-inflate the raft. Basically meaning that he had to blow air into the leg of the goats, yuk!

I went to yet another temple here too. But this one did have a bit of a twist. The underground passages were turned into a depiction of hades and what would happen in hell if you did wrong. It was very odd, sort of like psycadellic london dungeons. There were stone figures of people being cut in half, hung, being cooked, crushed and all sorts of very odd things. The odd the was it was painted in neon colours and lit by cloured tube lighting. Again unfortunatly you'd have to see pictures. Hopefully the next place i can spend some time again trying to upload photos.

Now off to meet the group and jump on the train for our overnight trip to Xi'an and the terracotta warriors. Not looking forward to this with my pained back from the camels, even a quality chinese massage hasn't seemed to have helped yet, but i may wake up in the morning a whole new person with limitless flexiblity. You never know.