Day 22 I arrived in Beijing ready for a brawl. Now, I'm not a violent man but had wound myself up so much on the train that I felt like bringing the pain on the first person that bothered me. Fortunately for Beijing, that was Daley, and he knows karate and that so I wasn't going to mess with him. In another uncharacteristic twist, the pair of us managed to find the bus heading towards our hostel and work out which stop we needed to get off at. This flurry of a...

Day 21 Today we left Xi'an for Beijing. In the morning we went to the Muslim Quarter to do some more bartering at the markets, and in the evening, we went for another dumpling dinner with some friends from the hostel. No one in the restaurant spoke English, neither did they have an English menu, so we just pointed at six dishes. Turns out we chose very well but I couldn't identify a single thing we'd eaten. After dinner we said our goodbyes and left for the sta...

Day 20 Unfortunately we had run out of things to do in Xi'an and our train was not until Wednesday, so the majority of the day was spent at the hostel researching and planning our itineraries Beijing and Vietnam. We went for dinner in a filthy restaurant in the Muslim Quarter. The waitress placed two dishes on the table, one I recognised as mine and the other Daley thought was his, so he poured himself a small bowl of the dish. A few minutes later, the waitress...

Day 19 Steve: "Urrrggh, what time is it?"Daley: "Erm, about eleven thirty."Steve: "Excellent, another day successfully wasted. How long have you been up?"Daley: "Got up about half seven, mate."Steve: "Oh do f*** off." Travelling is starting to feel a lot like University. Meet new people-become best of friends-go and get very, very drunk. After finally dragging myself out of bed, Daley and I booked our train ti...

Day 18 Today was a day that I had been looking forward to for months. Possibly even a whole year. We were off to see the Terracotta Warriors. The bus picked us up from our hostel at 6.30am, where our tour guide, whose English name was Snow (obviously), took us through some basic history about the warriors and the Qin dynasty. Our first stop was a Terracotta Warrior factory, where thousands of replicas are made. It was an interesting visit but I think I can spe...