We left Xian and the terracotta warriors on another overnight train to Suzhou and arrived in the midst of a torrential rainstorm! and we were going to send out raincoats back! here we were in the garden centre of south east china..... spent most of it in the back seat of taxis or standing at the side of the road trying to get into the back seat of taxis!!! and of course the next morning as we are leaving the sun was shining managed to convince our tour guide to let us wander around one of their gardens so at least we got to see some of Suzhou. We are now in Shanghai which is amazing, very different from Beijing which we were surprised at, very cosmopolitan lots of unusual high rise buildings and plenty of big business. Our tour ends here and we are off on an overnight train back to Beijing tonight. We had a great bunch on our tour and our guide Vivian was fabulous - very much more informative than we expected - her and alex got on famously!! Looking forward to arriving in Beijing as we are staying in a very nice hotel so a bit of pampering for a few days until alex goes home on wednesday and we go off for the next part of our tour to south west china Chengdu and pandas then off to Lhasa tibet.