Dear diary,

After a fairly long train journey, on a hard sleeper, which we shared with some mothers and their young children, we arrived in Chengdu, one of China's larger cities, fairly exhausted and a bit bleary-eyed. Our train got us into Chengdu station at around 5am, and it was around 5km from there to our guesthouse. For this reason we had planned to catch a taxi, as walking through a city at stupid o'clock didn't really sound like a barrel of laughs after not having much sleep! However, this of course would have been too easy... we joined the line for the taxi rank, and tried to explain where we wanted to go, we even had a map, but apparantly Chinese taxi drivers cant read maps, not even sure they knew what they were looking at... either that or they were very good at playing stupid! Anyway, after trying to show around 20 different taxi drivers (no exaggeration) where we wanted to go, we started walking.

It was quite an interesting walk, Nina had to wee in an alleyway as nowhere was open, and we got to see the city gradually come to life. It is really wierd how quite a city of 4 million + people can be so quiet at 5am. We did get lost but a couple of hours later we finally got there. The hostel was beautiful, down an old pedestrian area full of little cafe's and shops and really old traditional buildings. Our room was really nice too, more like a posh hotel than a hostel! Anyways, we pretty much just chilled and caught up on some sleep that day.

The next day we had a wander around town, with the aim of buying a new camera! We walked miles down to 'computer street'. The name pretty much gives it away, it was huge and so cool. They sold everything and at really cheap prices which you could haggle down. We finally found a camera we wanted and was quite cheap and went to get some cash. However, we ended up standing at the atm for about 15 mins and it still hadn't done anything, just said 'transaction processing' and it still had our card. After a while a guy behind us called the helpline number and explained what had happened. They guy at the other end of the phone said he needed to see if a worker was available to get our card back out but needed a chinese number he could call us on. I (Nina) went back to the camera shop and the guy let us use his phone. About an hour later we got a call back and after 30mins of going between him and the camera man i finally figured out what we were to do. Basically he gave us an address of their head office, we had to go there the next day with proof of ID and they would give us our card back! Until then we had no money and had to get our room deposit back for a mcdonald dinner haha.

The next day we walked to the bank's head office and after waiting a while they finally gave us our card back! It's funny, because they didn't read english, they couldn't work out which part was our name lol. Then we went and actually bought a camera! It's amazing, we love it like a child. lol. Then we basically walked around town taking pix and playing with our new gadget. Chengdu was quite hard, everything is so spread out so to get some food we had to walk like, 5kms. By the time we got to this restaurant it was about 8pm and we had walked about 25 kms that day. It was very late, about 10.30 by the time we walked home!

The day after we woke up early and caught a bus to the panda breeding centre!!!!!!! It was soo cool and the pandas were super cute. They had big pandas lazing around and eating bamboo and teen-age pandas playing and wrestling with each other and even red panda's. They were more like foxes and were really funny things with long bushy tails. It was a brilliant day! We even saw new born panda's in little incubators. They can't walk or see for the first few months and had to be looked after. They were so sweet!

Anyways, that night we went back to our hostel to grab our bags and got on a train to Xi'an. Had been a few very eventful days in Chengdu and luckily we had a soft sleeper this time in a 4-bed cabin. However the man we were sharing it with wouldn't let us close the door as he wanted 'fresh air'. Our cabin was next to the toilets. The air was not fresh.

Will write again soon......Terracotta warriors wahoo!!

Big love xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx