Shortly after my last postcard, I walked out into the market and saw a stall where they were selling puppies on leashes. The puppies were small little balls of fur doing puppy things - tying the leashes in knots and generally getting into scrapes. There was a girl there with her father, and they were deciding which puppy to buy. It was a heart-warming scene - right up to the moment when they chose, and the stall-holder picked up the puppy and put it on a wei...

I'm now in the far southwest corner of Guizhou priovince en route to Guilin. This is the home of rat and dog cuisine. Rat, when you can get it off the bone, tastes spicy (may have had something to do with the chili in the sauce) and dog tastes a bit like dog. In seafood restaurants in China you can sometimes order your dinner by pointing to a fish in a tank. Dog restaurants are simpler - you just whistle and shout "here boy". Ironically, given their fas...

We are now in Leshan, home of the tallest buddha in the world. That makes three places we've now been to which are home to the tallest buddha in the world. We arrived here yesterday, after visiting the panda breeding centre on the outskirts of Chengdu. Pandas are not sporty animals. If animals were to pick teams for a knock around game of football, pandas would be the ones left until last. They don't do much, and they do that slowly. Apparently, at...

I am now in Chongquing, insouth western China. We arrived here at 7:00am this morning, having cruised up the Yangtze for three days from Yichang. Chongquing is the seventh province we've visited in China and we'll be criss-crossing it and Szechuan for the next week or so. En route to Chongquing, we saw the three gorges dam, crossed six ship locks, saw the three gorges themselves, saw the mini three gorges, watched monkeys frolicking on cliff faces, cruised u...

On 17 June we passed the Silk Road monument, which is built on the old mustering point for silk road caravans at Xi'an. It marks the start and the end of the silk road, so it's official - we've completed it. Silk Road - tick. Some statistics: 1. Geography: - it took 89 days for us to travel 19,400 km by road from Dover to Xi'an. - our highest point was 4,090 metres above sea level on the road to Tashkurgan. - our lowest point was 50m below sea ...