Shiyou Hotel Lanzhou

... way to get drunk that....so we needed a better plan. Drinking in the street is (apparently) legal and for 50p a can of tsingtao it was basically a case of 2 of them while we find the next bar, another 2 to the next and so on...so good times all of a sudden drinking becomes affordable. The night took a bit of a turn when one of the felixstowe boys said yesterday they met a chinese dude (who lived in hong kong) called ray who was meeting us after he finished work...which was a bit ...

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... vultures to eat. This is deemed as an act of compassion to the birds. As the soul is deemed to have already left the body, the whole occasion is not deemed sad, but reflects the impermanence of life - a spiritual progress. We moved on to Drak Yerpa, via wonderful landscapes and the 3,980m Ngachen-la. As we turned into a valley by a Yerpa village, we passed 2 ruined forts (dzongs) and a disused dam, continuing climbing a sizeable hill. We passed an elaborate set ...

... and the chatter non-stop like at all Chinese dinners no matter how big or small they are. After dinner we moved about twenty meters and were all soon sitting in the city hall. What was to follow was just as beautiful as all the past Dance Performances I have been to in China. The colour, the elegance, the moves. To me it's like being in a movie or even a dream. No matter how long I live here it will always be ...

... Xunhua. They are very foreign in feel to the rest of China. The architecture is even different in this part of the country. Most houses seem to be made of bricks formed with yellow mud and straw. The eaves of the houses tweak up at the very end like the feathery ears of an owl. In the villages our buses passed from Lanzhou, where our flight arrived, elaborate, gorgeous green and silver mosques stood in sharp contrast to the sheer red and yellow ...

... colourful neons for the night. All this creates a memorable experience that I guess you would miss if you hire a bike to do it in under an hour. Life is what you make it and it is your time and your choice. Also being in a city such as Xian you must choose wisely. I have been to Xian city on many occasions and now that it has become my 'home' (so to say) I can now relax and do things at a much ...

... ATM machine, a carcass to be picked over. And so as you peruse the cabbage or consider the silk, be prepared to bargain. The objective, of course, is to obtain the Chinese price. You will, however, never actually receive the Chinese price. It is the holy grail for laowais--or foreigners--in China. Your status as a laowai is determined by how proximate your haggling gets you to the mythical Chinese price. But you will never obtain the Chinese price. Accept this. But if you're ...

... and our tour leader Baidi suggested going to a massage place - what a brilliant idea. So all the girls went and we had a hot shower then a full body scrub then some food then a massage. It was great but we got into the massage room and was wondering what the railings with some cloth tied to it were on the ceiling, then Simone thought it might be for the massage girls to hold on too when the walked on ...

... with thick vegetation year round it looked very exotic and different but I can imagine how difficult it must be to live there. Especially if you live in a cave dug on a mountain side (there are hundreds of them between the airport and the city center). Once in the city center we immediately headed to the south bus station to get on the 2:00 pm bus to Xiahe, our actual destination ...

... and we weren't sure what our next move would be. We want to go to Dunhuang next, where the famous Mogao Buddhist Caves are. However are guidebook is very scanty on information to get there. We can have a short bus trip, followed by a train (possibly at night, and probably without a bed), followed by another short bus trip; or we can get a bus the whole way, which seems easier to us. We have gleaned that we would get a bus to Hami, stay the night, then get ...