hello everyone still alive. tho nearly roasting in the heat. still cant get much on in the way of pics. il send a memory card home with chris and he can upload some. sorry! so we're in the hottest place in china. inexplicably a heat wave has descended on the province. 39 degrees plus. not getting a lot done today but the last week has been pretty cool. we did climb that mountain for sunrise. started at 11pm from the village of hua shan at its foot. climbed for 6 hours, a gradual descent it was not! lots of steps gong thru crazy tunnels and caves. reaced north peak by 3.30 then the hardest hour yet- didnt help we were nackered! to the summit of east peak. its one of the four holy taoist mountains in china and quite spectacular. it was hard but worth it and catching the sunrise was pretty romantic for me and chris. memorable! back to xian then we headed to another province henan, spent a night in the capital zhengzhou and visited a rather good museum holding artifacts from as far back as 500 bc. ancient seismographs, calligraphy, post, instruments, sculptures and opf course carved buddhas. was very interesting. felt like we were seeing a lot of chinas history without having to visit all the sites. very cool telescope type observatory thing... well a model anyway as all thats left is a mound of earth at the site. very clever. was nice and cool in there too. then we visited the shaoin temple, home fo the crazy kung fu monks. stayed 2 nights in shaolin village so we saw a lot of the temple compund, monks doing ceremonies and that, and the huge army type school of kung fu students practising mornings and evenings, with swords, sticks and far too many weapons to naturally be in the hands of small children! shaolin monk show was crazy too-we saw a guy fend off attack and bend two spears with his throat- left a mark after actually! and another threw a needle thru a plate of glass to pop a balloon. very odd. even ritchie would have been impressed! from shaolin we moved to luoyang, another big city but a little more accessible than zhengzhou. found a cheap hotel and are hiding from the sun today as it is boiling. visited huge expanse of longmens caves here yday, very impressive. hope to head to kaifeng tomorrow for 2 nights then onto chonquing to catch our boat. im very much hoping the weather will cool off elsewhere. but im not sure. take care everyone love to all sianxx ps im saved. there is a french carrefour supermarket here! maybe some milka???