Before we arrived in China we booked ourselves on a three week tour, starting in Hong Kong and working its way up through China to Beijing. The idea of booking a tour was mainly to make the language barrier less of a factor as we got a Chinese guide which made the whole process of travelling from place to place a whole lot simpler! Our Visa for entry into the country depended on us being able to prove where we would be staying through out every part of our stay so having it all written down as part of the tour made this nice and straight forward.

We arrived in Hong Kong early evening and made our way from the airport to our accommodation having had a great flight over from OZ and managing to watch three recently released films on the way!

The room we booked was as expected, clean and tidy but extremely cozy!

Having had little trouble moving from the airport to the hotel our first challenge arrived at breakfast the next morning, finding something palatable to eat! We were aiming for local food but after finding nothing but menus full of symbols or nothing but noodles we starved ourselves into submission and headed for McDonalds! Even when we did find out the locals eat a rice porridge sometimes and not just the noodles we kept seeing we tried it once and decided to go back to making our own breakfast!

Hong Kong is an interesting place to visit, its made up of several islands and a section attached to mainland China. We had two full days there and managed to visit the two main attractions, firstly the giant bronze Buddha on 'Lantau Island', this took us two hrs to que up for a cable car ride over and then another two hours to que up to come back! It is extremely impressive and well worth the effort tho. We also visited 'Hong Kong Island' and caught the tram up to the peak where you get a great view of Hong Kong and plenty of shops to check out. We met up with our group for the first time and went out to dinner together for a chance to get to know each other.

Late on the following day we left Hong Kong on a 12hr overnight sleeper train, the beds where in small 6 bed cabins of 3 tier bunk beds, pretty cosy but not too bad really and we had to get used to it as the trip included 5 nights on sleeper trains!

Yangshou was our first stop, A small town built amongst the mountains. We hired bikes and went out, with our group, on a 3hr bike ride amongst rice paddies and mountains. Halfway thru we stopped at a place known as 'Moon hill' and felt obliged to trek our way up to the top to take in the stunning surroundings.

Our Yangshou highlight was a fantastic light show performed over a lake set amongst the mountains which had all been lit up. Photos don't even begin to show how impressive it was, produced by the same people who performed the opening ceremony at the Beijing olympics.

We left Yangshou and caught our second over night train to Yichang where we boarded a rather dodgy looking boat to cruise along the Yangtze river. The river is the third longest in the world and runs through a very scenic area although when we were there it was pretty foggy so our photos haven't come out as clearly as we would have liked. We spent one night on the river and had a trip on a small boat before getting of in a very small/ remote town called Fengjie. This was only an over night stop before taking another boat trip up to see the controversial 'Three Gorge Dam' but on our short walk in the town we where met with a lot of curiosity from the locals, children and adults alike! Everyone wanted to say hello to us and use any English words they knew, people where staring at us and even taking photos! Its quite a strange feeling and as one young girl was asking us for our email addresses we almost felt like celebrities with the amount of interest and even a crowd that had appeared around us!

We left Fengjie on the funniest looking speed boat we've ever seen! It had some sort of rocket ship/ futuristic design but it had obviously had many years of abuse since it was built!

The rocket ship took us to Yichang where we spent on night in the small town before heading of to the 'Three Gorge Dam'. The dam itself is massive and quite impressive when you think how much work has gone into building it, started in 1993 and it is due to be completed next year so 16 years work and it is due provide power to one third of the country!

After rushing back to Yichang we quickly grabbed our bags and got a really short bus ride to the train station for another over night train to X'ian. This is was one of the stops we were most looking forward to as it is home to the 'Terracotta Warriors'. The town itself is surrounded entirely by a large ancient wall and is full of great markets to buy cheap food and souvenirs. We took a bus to see the warriors and although it was our guide's day off he decided to come with us, as he used to work at the museum, and gave us a full guided tour of the archaeological sight so we got full value from our experience. Its an incredible sight seeing so many man made life size figures all lined up and covering such a vast area, they were only discovered a little over 30 years ago after being buried 2200 years earlier. When they where originally formed they were all painted in incredible colours but as they unearthed the warriors the paint began to fade within minutes! There are still large sections of the sight that are yet to be dug up as they are waiting for technology to advance so they can preserve the colours of the still buried figures.

We had a comical exit to X'ian as for some strange reason our tour didn't book any mode of transport between the hotel and the train station so after our tour leader decided it would be too hard getting enough taxi's for us all at rush hour we ended up at a public bus stop. Now getting 12 of us on to fully packed bus would be interesting but getting all 12 of us and all our luggage on was hilarious, although I'm not so sure the Chinese passenger found it quite so entertaining!

After an over night 16 hr train journey we arrived in Shanghai. We walked along the bund and got to see the famous view across the water of all the skyscrapers. The Nanjing road is packed full of shops and we spent a bit of time wandering around the street window shopping although it would have a been a good place to have bought a knock of hand bag, wallet, sunglasses, watch or just about anything else you could think of being offered as you walked down the street!

Our tour leader took us on an unusual back street tour down through a decent little market and then onto a rather dodgy market where it was advised to where backpacks in front and keep your hands in your pockets at all times! The stalls seemed to sell all sorts of crap you wouldn't want although if you were in the market for fighting crickets/locusts to use in a gambling ring then you would be in the right place!

We seemed to have terrible luck finding anything decent to eat in Shanghai for some reason and we ended up with the worst meal of the whole trip while we where there. Out of four meals the only thing cooked properly was the rice and we had leave most of the meal without paying for it, which caused some disruption as no one spoke a word of English and our Chinese wasn't exactly first class! We had to rush off anyway as we had tickets to a show that essentially turned out to be some sort of talent show, all the acts were good at what they did but that doesn't mean that what they did was any good! It got a little bit boring in places although the final act was good, five people riding motor bikes around in a steel ball!

Leaving Shanghai behind we jumped on our last Chinese over night train and headed for Beijing. We knew our time was gonna be tight trying to fit everything that we wanted to see into what worked out as a day and a half! Unfortunately we didn't get time to see the temple of heaven or the Olympic village like we would have like but we managed fit in the main sights. Our first day included a quick visit to Tian'anmen square and a few hrs wandering through the Forbidden city, we then headed down to the Pearl Market in hope of finding a camera at bargain price. We did find the camera at a decent price but looking around and finding "Rolex" watches being sold for around 3 quid at the stall next door made me question how well the camera would work so we decided to leave it.

Our next and final day was spent on the great wall, we arrived early and caught a cabble car up to the wall, with it being the end of the tourist season we got to be the first people on this section of the wall for the day and got some great pictures, unspoilt by people wandering along in front! We were given a furthest point to walk in one direction as they are restoring various parts of the wall and it was unsafe to walk any further. The point we could reach was up a particularly steep and irregular set of steps that really took it out of everyone by the time we reached the top! We walked back down bit by bit and followed the wall past several towers until we reached a point that we could walk back down the mini bus, I'm glad we got the cable car up as it would have taken a big effort to have walked up!

We ended our tour with a group dinner and a Beijing speciality, Peking duck! The duck was brought out buy the chef and carved in front of us, a much fresher looking bird than you would ever get in a UK Chinese restaurant! This was our leaders favourite meal as he got to eat duck brains, the pictures say it all!

We really enjoyed our time in China and although we didn't get to see everything we would have liked, due to the time of year, we did get to enjoy everything with much smaller crowds than in the peak tourist season. There are plenty of places in China that we would still like to go and see so we may well return some day!

NEXT STOP: Singapore + Malaysia