We journeyed up to Shangri-La on a public bus which included smokers all around us and spit buckets in the aisles, apart from that and getting stuck at a landslide for a bit the journey went quite smoothly. We arrived in Shangri-La which was renamed so from Zhongdian by the Chinese as they decided it was the real Shangri-L; although it is nice we don't quite think it is paradise unless we got the wrong bus. Unfortunately Mark was poorly for most of the days w...

We arrived in Lijiang on Friday (15th) after our flights being changed about 5 times, but we got here.Lijiang is in Yunnan province it is an UNESCO town and is basically lots of cobbled streets, wooden buildings and canals and streams. It is very picturesque and nice for a wander around although it is very easy to get lost; which we did a couple times on our first day!We havent really done much here as the last two days it has been raining mostly but Mark got to ...

On Wednesday (13th) we went on a day trip with our pals Paul and Ian to see the worlds biggest carved stone Buddha. We drove to Leshan which is to the south of Chengdu it took about 3 hours with Jane, Paul and Ian squished into the back seat of a mini mini van whilst Mark was able to stretch out and enjoy the space of the front seat although he did have to watch closely all of the near collisions due to the crazy driving (this driver did use his indicators occasi...

We arrived in Chengdu after flying from Xi'an yesterday and what did we do as soon as we got to our hostel; thats right booked our panda tour!So today we got up pretty early (after watching Jaws last night) and headed off on our tour bus to Chengdu Panda Research Base; this is where the pandas are.What can we say but it was totally awesome, we saw loads of pandas, some climbing trees, most of them were eating or sleeping as pandas do, one stole the others foo...

Yesterday we flew from Beijing to Xi'an and arrived at our hostel which has the biggest bed ever for us we reckon you could fit 4 people in it (or one Jane and One Mark stretched out).We had a wander to the city walls and walked along them for a bit which was cool; they are so big that it takes about 4 hours to walk around, or you can cycle or take a rickshaw; thats on the top of the wall bythe way. We decided to jog around and it only took about 30minutes. T...