Our first full day in Kashgar started with a long, meandering walk through the Old City in search of something to eat for breakfast, a search made difficult by its being Ramadan in a near-wholly Muslim area. All we could find was the odd stall hung with skinned, headless sheep (these sheep really confused me because they seemed to have neck stumps at each end of their body.), but eventually we managed to find a fruit stall behind one of these meat stalls where we...

Arriving in Kashgar felt like arriving in a totally different country. For a start, there were barely any Chinese people - or, Han Chinese people. In fact, the only Han Chinese people I saw were those working in the train station. Everyone else looked to be Uighur, with darker skin, bigger noses and green eyes. The girls were wearing long skirts and patterned scarves instead of the tiny shorts and glittery t-shirts we're used to seeing, and the majority of the me...

We were in Urumqi for a couple of hours, but most of that was spent crawling across the city centre in a terrible traffic jam, and then back out of the city in a minibus on its way to Bagang, where Hannah's project was based. Visiting Bagang was exciting for several reasons: first, we'd get to slob around and relax for a couple of days; second, we'd be reunited with Beth and Dan there and finally, we'd get to try gotye, the local fried dumpling specialty that Han...

To get from Dunhuang to Urumqi, in Xinjiang, we were taking a 14hr overnight bus which we, fairly, I think, expected to horrible. Our visit was also coinciding with a period of violence in Xinjiang, seemingly related to its being the anniversary of serious riots by the local Uighur minority in 2009, so we were worried that we, as tourists, might not be allowed into the area. Luckily, we were, although police came onto our bus to check the identity papers of all t...

All three of us liked Dunhuang from the first. It was clean, quiet and sunny all the time we were there, with none of the big ugly tower blocks we're used to and the feel of being a town rather than a city. The streets were empty when we arrived, even though it was about 8am. We went straight to our hostel, took advantage of the receptionist's foolish offer to help us bring our bags up the three flights of stairs, then collapsed in our room and slept away the res...