To Mekong delta, the rice, fruit and veg basket of the South. A tropical climate, the temperature was in the 30s with high humidity. We took a small boat to get to the village of Cai Thia where we cycled around, visiting a family to see how rice paper is made. The people are very hospitable and we tasted rice paper with soy sauce, crispy rice paper with sesame seeds and their home grown fruit. I now have the recipe for Miss Thuy's jam, which I shall try making. ...

At HK airport we exchanged the last of our yuan for Vietnamese Dong. ¥265 is about £26 and bought us 650,000 Dong. At the ATM the option was for a million or half a million Dong. I withdrew half a million, then realised this is only about £22 worth! We are now officially millionaires as we currently have 3,387,000 Dong on hand. The smallest note seems to be 2000, about 8.5 pence. Coins were introduced a few years ago, but the people didn't like them so they we...

Back to Shanghai for some of Pete and Ros' home cooking and to do our washing before setting off for Vietnam.

Conisbee weather again, pouring rain and thick fog making it impossible to see the river banks. I went to demonstrations of Chinese embroidery, Chinese medicine and Chinese massage. At 5pm we all trooped ashore to visit Shibaozhai, a dripping gaggle of plastic poncho clad tourists. A pagoda was built as a way to access the top of a steep sided rock, and a Monastery is on the top. We didn't join the queue to walk up the 9 storeys as the cruise ships each hold abou...

An early flight to Chongqing (pronounced Chong Ching), lunch followed by a city tour. This is a modern, sprawling city, and like all the others we've visited has a huge building programme to house the people who've flocked to the cities to work. It has shipbuilding and heavy industry along the banks of the Yangtze and its tributaries. We were taken to a museum of Sichuan immigration, where we saw a typical building of the Ming dynasty (around 1723). Our guide e...