Tongren was the first real stop on Cat, Hannah and I's path along the old Silk Road. From here, the three of us would spend 10 days inching further north-west towards Hannah's project, Bagang, by Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province. Here we would pause to catch our breath and reunite with Beth and Dan, who'd have finished their summer camp, and the five of us would continue on to Kashgar together, which is conclusion of the Silk Road in China. I think our route towards Bagang could be quite confusing, so I'll outline it here to try and explain it better: we took 3 days to visit Tongren and Xiahe, both on the Tibetan plateau and very close to Xining; then we returned to Xining to collect the big bags we'd left there and continue onto Zhangye, which was Nold and Alex's project this year. After a day in Zhangye, we would go to Jiayuguan, where we'd spend another day and finally, we'd catch another overnight train to Dunhuang, where we'd stay for two days.

The first thing we did on arriving in Tongren was to try to arrange somewhere to stay for the night, which we did by walking into the first hotel we spotted as we walked up the high street. It was obvious from the first that this was quite a scummy hotel, but we didn't realise quite how scummy it was until we'd paid for our room and asked where the toilets were. The toilet, when we found it, was essentially the chokey from Matilda but with a filthy, stained squat toilet installed and a naked lightbulb swinging through the lack of ceiling. There wasn't even a sink.

We escaped the hole that was our hotel for lunch as quickly as we could. Tongren was a tiny town, with the majority of the pavements dug up for reconstruction. Tourists, and especially foreign tourists, were clearly not very common. The two old Tibetan women in the same restaurant as us for lunch couldn't stop staring at us; whilst we were eating our noodles, they drifted over to peer over our shoulders and stroke the bracelets on our wrists (we've kept up with buying a bracelet in each place we visit, so our wrists are now effectively manacled with dozens of them).

The first place we visited, a temple complex a short drive outside of town, was empty but for us and a couple of monks. This was one of my favourites of the places we've visited - maybe all year. Everything in the complex was just so detailed and colourful; every inch of every hall and stupa had been fastidiously and painstakingly decorated with thousands of painted Buddhas and gods, sculptures, murals and carvings, all in a plethora of different colours, and half of it then lavished with gold leaf just for good measure. Having the place to ourselves, we wandered about as we liked, spinning the gold prayer wheels and nosying about into all the different courtyards and halls. Once we bumped into a little Tibetan lady, with her two pigtails tied together at her back to form one long loop, who corrected us for walking about the temple anti-clockwise - very inauspicious, it should always be clockwise! Later, we stumbled past a parade of eight more elaborate stupas and into a courtyard where a new temple was still mid-construction. The only people working on the temple were very old Tibetan ladies, carrying wooden planks about and hacking dried plaster off the temple floor with chisels. One of these ladies was particularly friendly and led us into the temple for a tour of its progress. Usually when we visit temples, they're quite old and musty, the colours in the paintings have faded and there's a healthy amount of dust on everything. Here though, everything was glossy and shiny and freshly painted. Despite some significant translatory difficulties, we managed to get quite a lot of information from our new tour guide, whose four sons were all involved in the building/decorating process too. She herself had been painting the screens that were being installed over the plain brick walls, and her oldest son had been in charge of gold-leafing the enormous Buddha sat in the centre of the temple. So far, construction had taken 3 years; they expected to finish in the next couple of months.

Outside of the temple were several art shops selling high-quality tankhas. We'd spent a good amount of time looking about and quizzing the artists in one of these shops before we looked around the temple, but prices, whilst reasonable, were still way outside our budget. Giving up hope of buying our own tankhas, we ventured instead into the dustiest and worst-stocked snack-shop believable, which turned out to be some sort of cover for a secret tankha shop reached through a side door. This shop was an Aladdin's cave of tankhas, with every wall and surface draped in layers of tankhas in every size - including a couple only a little bigger than A4, which Hannah and I immediately started eyeing up as potentially within our price range, and ended up buying for what we believe to be a very good price. (I won't say what in case I end up proven wrong, because that would put a bit of a downer on the purchase.)

Full of enthusiasm for sight-seeing and Tongren, and riding on the high of having walked straight out of the tankha shop and onto a very cheap public mini-bus, we went straight to another monastery at the top of town, Longwu Si (?). This was significantly less beautiful, but much more active than those we'd just visited. We quickly acquired two more tour-guides to show us around the main hall: one tall, Chinese-speaking monk and a second, god-knows-what-speaking monk of questionable mental stability. Whilst Cat and her dictionary chatted with the sane monk to work out the meaning behind the statues and portraits in the hall, me and the mad monk bonded through the medium of mime. The sane monk told us that all of the candles and several sculptures in the hall were made of butter; unbelieving, we tried to confirm that we'd understood properly by checking, "butter? Like, cow butter?" (in Chinese). In order to involve the non-Chinese-speaking monk in the conversation, I tried to mime being a cow. Bad idea. He burst out laughing squeakily, and continued to lapse into laughter at the sight of me throughout the next two hours. Our tour concluded, and we tried to eke some tips about where to sample some Tibetan food out of the monks. They didn't know of anywhere, but they offered to show us how to make traditional Tibetan zanba bread, if we'd go back to their quarters with them. Obviously, we said yes. The monks' quarters were very small and plain, but by no means as sparse as you'd expect for people who've vowed to live a life free of all desire and material wants; having electricity is one thing, but a decent-sized TV and a muddle of Apple cables to charge iPhones is another. The zanba bread was a mixture of yak butter, barley, sugar and boiled water which we mixed ourselves with our index fingersrt; the bread was finished once squished into a warm dough. We didn't as such enjoy the bread, but it was good fun to make - and cool to have been taught by monks. We stayed chatting with the monks for quite a while, explaining all about our gap years and how we'd been teaching for the last 10 months, which is how we came to be called awesome by the monks. MONKS CALLED US AWESOME. (Admittedly, alternate translations were 'terrible', 'devastating' and 'severe'.) After an hour or so, as the monastery was nearing closing time for visitors, we made our excuses and stood up to say goodbye. Our departure was delayed, however, by the monks wanting photos of us together on their iPhones, and then wanting to exchange WeChats (a social media popular in China where you can send voice messages and pictures as well as texts), which we duly did. Since then, we've kept in touch with these monks on our travels: we tell them whereabouts we are in China and answer odd questions; they send us a strange variety of obscure emoticons, voice messages and pictures. Highlights have included a voice clip of the two of them chanting and a photo of the sane monk reclining with a beatific smile in a field of yellow flowers. This last is one of the most brilliant things I've ever seen; we've taken to digging it out whenever we feel stressed or unhappy because it never fails to make us laugh.

Having said goodbye to our new best friends, the three of us tried to rush around the rest of the monastery before it closed and before Hannah wet herself. We were pursued part of the way by a gang of younger monks (monks can be as young as 7), who ducked behind walls laughing whenever we turned around and fought over a creepy mask to try and scare us with. We probably did seem quite scared, because we speed-walked off at top speed in desperate (for Hannah) search of a toilet.

That evening, we set up camp in the grotty hallway of our hotel, the only place in the hotel with wifi signal, to Skype Beth in Xinjiang. I stayed in the hallway sending emails after the other girls went back to bed, where I caught the attention of three young Tibetan guys who arrived at the hotel later. They were all excited to see a foreigner and stood in a (slightly intimidating) circle around me, pointing at different objects, asking me to speak the English for them, then giggling and trying to repeat the words themselves: 'phone', 'table', 'door', '1,2,3...' This wasn't as hilarious for me as it obviously was for them so I feigned tiredness and ducked away just as they were gearing up to teach me numbers 1-10 in Chinese. The night ended grimily with the three of us, forced by the lack of sink anywhere in the hotel, brushing our teeth with bottled water and spitting the toothpaste out into an old ashtray. Lovely.