Our boat on the Yangzi River was named the M.S. Fortune.... or Msfortune as someone cheerfully pointed out - good name for a boat 'Misfortune'!!! The boat was surprisingly nice with all meals included, nice cabins and a bar! Our first night before setting sail we headed off for hotpot though this time it was very spicy and as we were sitting at the 'adventurous' table our dipping ingredients included cows stomach, congealed chicken blood, sheep intestines and co...

Big Buddha! No not a curse but the object of our visit after leaving the Giant Pandas. In fact we were vistiting the largest outside seated Buddha in the World...are you impressed? You should be! It was actually very impressive - we went on a boat trip to see it from the river first (though as we all got on the wrong boat we nearly didn't go anywhere!) and then climbed up a rather a lot of steps to see it from the top. Mark bravely walked down hundreds of steps...

Another overnight train - this one for 18 hours - was passed playing a card game called ' Backpacker' (apt!) Chengdu is a lovely little town, much nicer than Xi'an, with ornate Chinese buildings, a friendly atmosphere and best of all NO SMOG! Our first activity in Chengdu was to take a Chinese cooking lesson cooking spicy Sichuan food. Mark was a little reluctant but secretly quite liked his apron and enjoyed cooking his steamed spicy eggplant and Gung Po Chic...

Chinese sleeper trains are an experience! We took one from Beijing to Xi'an and were cramped into 6 berth compartments with three tier bunks up each wall. We all crowded into one compartment to drink some very dodgy 67% proof fruit flavoured spirit and play drinking games - great fun! We were sharing our compartment with a Chinese family who gave us manadarins for breakfast. The little girl was chatting away in Chinese to Mark and all he could say was 'uh ok'! T...

We met up with our tour group of 10 people - 8 Brits and 2 Aussies. Weird being around so many British people all of a sudden! Our first day of the tour was a visit to the Great Wall of China....but not the easy, renovated, touristy bit of the Great Wall oh no...a challenging 10k stretch of crumbling wall with no flat bits only steep hills and steep drops! In some places we were climbing steep steps with both hands and feet or tentatively climbing down what appe...