In transit

We've left it a while again since our last update, mainly because we've not really been doing all that much since then! The sightseeing apathy has struck hard, but we've managed to keep ourselves occupied with some more good stuff...

Last time around we were thinking of going swimming in the Olympic pool, but what a goose chase that turned out to be. If anyone is thinking of coming to China, dont buy the Rough Guide, it was written in about 1850 and has led us down more blind alleys than we care to remember... its suggestion of heading down there for a swim seemed so straight forwards on paper but the reality turned out to be far from simple.

We'd picked a stinker of a day for it; the humidity was so high that we were soaked long before we even found the building the pool was in. The visibility was shocking, so we could only just see the birds nest stadium looming out of the gloom which was a shame. We negotiated an army of Chinese tourists, ticket touts and all sorts of unhelpful officials before arriving around the back of the "Water Cube" building. Finally someone helpful turned up, but then this is seriously what we'd had to do to go swimming :

1. Pay 5 quid to enter the building
2. Take a swimming test (another 2 quid) - swimming 50 metres without drowning
3. Present a passport photo (another few pounds as strangely we'd not planned for this in advance...) in order to get our swimming license
4. Pay another 5 quid for a lovely swimming hat

As we are now officially pikey travellers, the thought of paying half our daily budget to go for a swim was a bit mad, so we turned tail and sweated our way back home. Seriously, its this stuff you buy the guide book to avoid!

Next on our list of things to see in Beijing was the 798 Art District. This is a large area of converted factories that the government have quite successfully given over to modern art in its many and quite bizarre forms. Its a bit like having the Tate Modern spread out around Shoreditch, and it works really well.



I have to admit modern art is more Alex's cup of tea than mine, but after a little bit of moaning I did really enjoy it. Its all a bit hit or miss, but the hits were really quite memorable. (Although I have to pull up the Rough Guide here again; out of all the amazing sites this country has to offer, they reckon this little art district is second only to Mount Everest in terms of things to see. Bonkers.)

That night we headed back to our hostel (the second of the three we ended up staying in around Beijing) - we'd been trying to find somewhere nice nearby to eat but that night we really hit the jackpot.



I'm not sure how well that picture will scale, but its a page from the menu. We were quite used to guessing picture menus, or getting our heads around baffling Chinglish translations, but this one took things to a whole new level of "I'm not really that hungry anymore..." In case you can't see it, here are some of the highlights on offer :

• Sliced Tender Beef (from spine)
• Ox Penis
• Thinly Sliced Fatty Beef
• Cow's Spinal Cord
• Pig Brains
• Fresh Duck Intestines
• Fresh Goose Intestines
• Sliced Pig's Kidney
• Fresh Cow's Third Stomach
• Cow's Stomach
• Pig's Trachea
• Chicken Gizzards
• Duck Blood Tofu

I think in the couple of days were tried to find somewhere nice to eat, I had 4 sweet and sour porks (although you could barely call it pork) in the space of 2 days. And one of them was for breakfast. I felt bad not trying a bit more of the local food, after all we'd done really well in India - but it was just too much of a minefield. All in all Chinese food has been shocking, a real let down. After doing a bit of research online Alex found quite a few websites dedicated to tracking down places that actually served reasonably priced edible food... it was quite a short list.

With an epic fail on the eating front under our belts, we turned to an activity that rarely leaves us stumped... drinking. Beijing Timeout was a really good read, and tipped us of to the oh-so-touristy Houhai area. Set around three big man made lakes, this area was lined with cheesy lounge bars, complete with shouty touts and hordes of local tourists.



Most of the bars had some sort of live music, but there were so many bars that quite a few were completely empty, leaving plenty of sorry looking Chinese two pieces singing ballads to themselves. We found a crazy reggae place with a Spanish gypsy/flamenco band and settled into the mojitos until the budget forced us back home again!

The walk back was about 40 minutes but we'd harded a little more to it by then, we were probably walking 5 miles a day at this point. It was nice though, we came across lots of nice areas, like this one called Ghost Street quite close to our hostel :



The road is lined with (mostly nasty) restaurants, but they've all got lanterns outside which make the place look very picturesque at night.

After a break from the serious sightseeing, we were back on it the next day, and headed to the Summer Palace in the north-western outskirts of the city. This place was another amazing day out, in a similar vein to the forbidden city but spread out all around a huge lake. The walk around took pretty much all day, but the sights were worth it, ornate bridges, temples etc and massive lily ponds all around :



Obviously with such a big lake involved we couldn't resist a bit of pedalo action. Alex has been lamenting the lack of gym opportunities on the trip so I spent a fair proportion of the time with my feet up to let her rectify this... how considerate of me =)



We just about made it around in one piece, although on the way back we did have a run in with one of these chaps :



There were about 6 of them crossing the lake and didn't really pay too much attention to the tiny pedalos around them...

Our attentions then turned back to food, and with in the spirit of "if you can't beat them, join them" we headed down to the night markets in the centre of the city. This place is famous for bringing together all of the regional snack dishes and serving them out to the tourists during the night, but I dont think we were quite ready for quite how wacky it was going to be...



We'd convinced ourselves to try something, and Alex set upon the fried scorpions as "it just had to be done." It was either that or chickens feet or bug larvae, so we grabbed a stick for £1.50 and psyched ourselves up. At this point several other tourists walked by and asked if we were mad, but we went for it anyway.

As they say on the internet, pics or it didn't happen...





They were surprisingly palatable, but didn't really taste of much. Definitely worth a try if you get the chance!

The next trip out was back to Houhai in the day, we liked the look of the lakes and so we hired a tandem bike to explore them in more detail.



It didn't take us too long to get the hang of it, but we did have a lot of locals running scared going through the narrow lanes of the hutongs surrounding the lakes. We stayed around in the evening and decided it was time to blow the budget and have a feast day... it was time to duck it up, Beijing style :



Its pretty similar to the crispy shredded duck pancakes you get back home, except the focus is on the crispy skin and the fat rather than the shredded meat. We splashed on some wine as well, and had a really nice night.

So thats about it for Beijing, and ultimately for China. Due to the sightseeing apathy we never made it to a couple of the other places we thought about visiting in China, spending maybe 10 nights in Beijing in total. We managed to make a mess of the second hostel booking and got kicked out the night before we were due to leave, but fortunately found another place just around the corner easily enough! We hit the main station in Beijing, heading for another soft sleeper bound for Shanghai.



So now we are back in Shanghai, at the same hostel we stayed in before. We have another night here tomorrow, before we have to get up at 4 am (cry) to head to the airport to catch a flight back to Hong Kong. There we have to spend another night before finally getting the plane down to Hanoi... roll on Vietnam.

Xi'an and Beijing

Its been a little while since our last post so this one has got a fair bit of catching up to do. Fortunately our latest hostel has a good wireless connection in a nice bar/cafe bit so we are relaxing nicely after another big day and getting an update in.

Our last update was just before we went on the terracotta army; we'd arranged the day trip out through the hostel where we were staying in the centre of Xi'an. These trips have been a pretty good way of meeting other travelers, and our tour guide turned out to be a crazy Chinese girl called Za Za. It was just like a school trip - we had to introduce ourselves and say where we were from, and then she went round a hit us all with stereotypes of each country which was a fairly strange start to the day.

In hindsight the whole day was a bit backwards - the first stop was at a "factory" where they sold overpriced knockoffs to the tourists. One thing they did was take a load of photos of you and build a life size terracotta army model of you; they had a few in their back room waiting to be shipped and it was really weird seeing western features on the ancient Chinese soldiers bodies. It was definitely odd seeing the fakes before we saw the real thing, and also they had so many pictures there it was almost like we didn't want to look too much in fear of spoiling it later on.

From there it was a short journey back in the bus to the tourist complex outside the main site. By this stage the heat and humidity switch had been dialed right up to 11, and we had to face a 1km trek from the bus to the entrance. Needless to say everyone was a sweaty mess by the time we hit the waves of security gates needed to get into the main area. In classic backwards fashion our guide preceded to take us around everything in reverse order of impressiveness... I'm sure she thought this was a good idea at the time but after seeing some fairly unimpressive bits that hadn't been dug out yet (and a truly awful 360 degree film that looks like it was shot in the 70s) we finally made it to the main building number 1.



It was packed out with thousands of sweaty people, but we managed to jostle to the front (handy being a clear foot taller than everyone else...) and get some pictures of the main chunk of soldiers. Some people report feeling underwhelmed by the whole thing, and from our experience you can kind of see what they mean... but we loved witnessing the results of the amazingly wacky concept of burying 8,000+ pottery soldiers underground to try and take them to heaven with you. I was surprised they'd stopped really trying to dig out any more of the site - I took a fair bit of imagination to appreciate the real epic-ness of it when two-thirds of the site was just rock underneath huge aircraft hangers. Maybe they should send the worlds trainee archeologists over year as part of their training, even with China's mind blowing human resources they think it would still take hundreds of years to extract everything there.

Our tour didn't go to the other tombs nearby - as well as burying the soldiers the emperor Qin Shi Huang also built an gigantic underground city nearby, and legend has it that it had rivers of liquid mercury flowing through it. This is the reason they give for not excavating further - the mercury levels in the ground make it dangerous to work there. I reckon if Time Team got in on the action, they'd have it up in no time, but I can't see that happening soon.

The next day we stayed in central Xi'an, and took the guide books advice about exploring the city walls on two wheels.



This was a load of fun, it was about 14km around the circumference and they gave you just about enough time to pedal around it like a lunatic before the extra time fees started clocking up. The bad news was that we'd started taking liberties with the sun cream, and both got burnt to a crisp. There are some lovely photos of my gloriously red neck, and secret agent style white sunglasses marks but we wont be posting those... Alex managed to escape serious embarrassment sadly bah!

That night we went to see a show that had been pitched to us in the hostel and recommended online. It was called the Tang Dynasty Show or something similar, and it was one of the wackiest/most hilarous things we'd ever seen. There were about 10 scenes of traditional dance and music, linked together by a crazy shouting Emperor character. The standout was a crazy trumpet chap - he was playing this really small trumpet that sounded a lot like a kazoo, and he just went crazy. Halfway through it took the trumpet out of his mouth and just kept going (for those that saw the last series of Britian's Got Talent, think of that crazy Sax guy) making the strangest noises you have ever heard. Well you have to try everything once...

Later that night we revisited some of the sights we'd seen during the day and got some nice night time pictures of the centre of Xi'an:



(I was hiding from the camera for a good few days...)

That was about it for Xi'an, so we booked our train tickets (overnight soft sleeper again) to Beijing. During the change over days we checkout in the morning, leave our bags at the hostel and try and do relaxing things that wont make us too hot or sweaty - this time we thought we'd try and get a nice back massage. The rough guide tipped us off about a massage centre staffed by blind masseuses, which sounded like a good thing to try... but ooooh how wrong can you go. These guys were professional torturers, and they met our cries of pain with laughter and even more gusto. Coming from the nice "massage with oil" school of relaxing massage back in the UK, this crazy pressure point Shiatsu wasn't really what we'd bargained for:



We hit the train with a lot more pain than we started the day with, but hopefully there were other therapeutic benefits too =)

Ok onto Beijing - the train was brilliant as usual, although being woken up at 7am and stumbling off the train straight into Beijing was pretty disorienting. We found our hostel after dealing with the standard shouty taxi driver, and went straight back to sleep! That afternoon we walked to Tiananmen Square (fairly bleak concrete jungle, reminded me of Coventry) and then on to an area with a good choice of bars for a drink. We quickly learned the first lesson of Beijing: dont try and walk anywhere. This place is huge... the map scale was 4km per few centimeters, so something that looked just around the corner was in fact miles away.

The next day was boiling hot again, but we soldiered on and visited the Forbidden City, home of Chinese emperors over the years. This picture was taken just outside:



This was another amazing place, again delivering on the distinctly Chinese ability to come up with sites on a scale that we'd never seen before. There were so many buildings and corridors and courtyards we quickly got lost, but it was really good fun exploring without a map. Both of us realised we were getting a little bit jaded from the amount of sightseeing we'd done (we really really need a beach soon!) so we didn't spend much time on the exhibitions.

Another running theme on China is hit and miss meals - many of the restaurants don't have English menus, pictures or staff that speak any English at all. So quite often a picture menu is a good as it gets, and we've found its surprisingly tough to pick tasty good based on a picture! I tend to do worse out of this than Alex; she tends to stick to tasty veggie options whilst I'm valiantly determined to go for meat dishes. This particular night was the crowning glory of bad choices :



In the picture it looked like a tasty chicken with chili dish, but when it emerged it turned out to be a beast... whole chillies, mixed with chopped chillies, whole cloves of garlic and bits of chicken bones and gristle. Bonus. I'm sorry to say I had to have a cheeky KFC for desert, it was that bad.

Right I'm going on quite a bit today so time to speed up a bit. We saw a really really good acrobatics show that night, well worth seeing if you are in Beijing.



Next big thing - the Great Wall. We signed up for another hostel trip so we joined 20 or so other travelers and jumped into the (nicely air conned) bus to the section of the wall at Mutianyu.



We did about 3 hours walking along the stretch of wall, which was amazing. This is one thing that really did live up to expectations and more... the scenery was breathtaking (or was that walking up and down steep hills in the sunshine? =), sorry couldn't resist..) and yet again the scale of it all really gets your imagination going - apparently 1/5 of the entire population of China helped build the thing. It was the same wacky Emperor that was responsible for the terracotta army who had a hand in this, by this point he was so mad from the mercury he probably though it was a reasonable thing to try and build...



They had a really fun bobsleigh effort on the way down which I really couldn't resist, it was good fun even if we were shouted at AGAIN... our speed was considered TOOO FAAAAAST and we definitely weren't supposed to be taking any photos. Heaven forbid!



And the award for longest post ever goes to... time to call it a night. Tomorrow we are mostly going to be chilling out, and maybe checking out the Olympic swimming pool if our legs haven't seized up completely!

Xi'an

We made it through the epic 15 hour journey from Shanghai to Xi'an, but to be honest we spent almost all of it fast asleep on the comfy soft sleeper beds. Its a very civilised way to travel, even if your cabin mates are two very snorey Chinese chaps (for once even my snoring was put to shame, these guys taught me a thing or two.) Other than that the train wasn't too different from India, the same mad panic about platforms and whether we were getting off at the right stop etc. The people were much quieter and less raucous, in fact our mates called it a night around 10pm, and were snoring for China by 10:30.

Xi'an (which we now know is pronounced She'an, after a scary run in with the lady at the Shanghai train ticket office...) has definitely picked up our spirits after the disappointment of the building site we came from. The first site that greats you from the station is the north side of the huge wall that encloses the city - apparently you can hire a bike and cycle around the wall, ace. The city inside the walls seems a little more personal than the huge roads in Shanghai, and its much easier to just stroll around taking in the sights.

We are staying in a hostel called Hang Tan, about 500m away from the Bell Tower in the centre of the town. Its another proper hostel, with peoples signatures and doodles all over the walls, and a really nice cafe-bar full of clutter and interesting people. We've signed up for the uber tourist trip to see the Terracotta army tomorrow, and to see the Tang Dynasty show on Friday night. We are both pretty excited about tomorrow, these big old epic touristy days maybe a little predictable but so far they haven't disappointed.

Now for some photos, here are some we've just uploaded from Shanghai. The first is a classic geek tourist shot; me with the worlds only commercial maglev train.



This is the central shopping street that runs for a good mile or so through the centre, there were about 7 Maccy D's, KFCs and Pizza Huts alone...



This is Alex enjoying a ten quid (slightly over budget!!) mojito at the worlds highest bar, so much for sticking to the cheap beers =)



And finally, a couple from many pictures from the boat ride, the views were absolutely brilliant.





And thats about it, will upload some Xi'an pictures, hopefully with some of the little pottery chaps, tomorrow...

China

We are coming to the end of our time in Shanghai, and tomorrow we leave for Xi'an . This is just a quick post to say we are still going strong but we can't update the blog or facebook due to the Chinese censorship/firewall. Its a bit annoying beining disconnected, but the facebook block was due to the recent riots so its unlikely to be lifted any time soon.

Shanghai has been a bit of a disappointment, because the entire city is undergoing a massive makeover ready for an expo next year. The slogan is "better city, better life" but right now the whole place is one big bulding site. We made it out onto a boat trip today which managed to get us on the other side of the building sites, and we could actually see the city which was nice. The pictures of the buildings they are putting up look great, so if anyone was thinking of coming here, wait until May 1st 2010 =)

Despite that, we've had a few good trips out - last night we had cocktails in the worlds highest bar (I think they mean bar at the top of a man made structure) which was amazing - there was a thunder storm at the same time so the view over the city was really atmospheric. It was pretty pricey though, and we did have to put on our smartest clothes to make them believe we wernt the scummy travellers that we are. Great fun though, highly recommended.

Thast about it for now, I'm working on a way to get updates out more easily so hopefully we'll be able write more soon. Xi'an is teracotta army territory, which we are quite looking forwards to, so fingers crossed we can post some pics then.

Hong Kong

So we made it to our second destination - Hong Kong. (Before we get started I keep typing it as Honk Konk so sorry if I miss any of the typos)

The flight from Delhi was a strange one - it was a Cathay Pacific flight and pretty much all the attendants were wearing crazy surgical face masks. This was our first run in with what now seems common - people here are really really paranoid about getting ill. It turns out that swine flu has piqued the historical issues of contagions in this area, so no one is taking any chances.

Another thing of note was that the flight attendants had to work harder than any we've ever seen before - we need to be a bit careful about generalising here - but many of the Indian people on the plane were a real bloody handful. No seatbelts, bags in the isle, standing up all the time, it was crazy. One chap insisted on getting a water just as the plane was about to take off, and it took a long time to explain that the lady couldn't serve him straight away. It was our first real encounter with people who speak two radically different languages trying to get by in English as their common ground, making us feel a bit bad as we'd learnt so little Hindi and only one word of Mandarin so far.

The flight was good, it was over night so we saved ourselves one nights hotel money. The only downer was not getting too much sleep, as we landed in HK around 7:30 am. First impressions were amazing, great airport, really good express train into town etc. Our hotel was straight out of the rough guide again (Star Guest House) and was well located in Tsimshatsui, Kowloon. This is a 15 minute walk away from the ferry and the views over to HK island proper. The room was tiny though, but amazingly clean compared to India, but much more expensive.

First things first we hit the sack to catch up on our sleep, but soon Alex realised she'd brought a little friend with her from Delhi. We blame the plane food, but either way it was another bout of food poisoning to deal with. She hit the sack for a few hours and I went for a wander.

One of the things I'd worried about before leaving was whether or not to take my laptop with me... I figured it'd do me good to disconnect and leave the tech behind. After a month of faffing with internet cafes I caved in, and HK seemed like a good place to pick up a cheap netbook to sort myself out. Within about an hour (with help from some sage advice from Martyn) I landed a Samsung NC10, happy days. (Alex says I can't write an entire paragraph about what computer I've bought, gah. Busted.)

Anyway, Alex was still feeling bad when I got in, so we had a banana and crisps dinner and watched TV and had an early night. Very rock and roll =)

The next day was much better, we'd decided our first sightseeing mission would be to visit the highest spot on the island, Victoria Peak. Alex's belly wasn't up for the boat, so we took a quick photo and headed for the metro.



We took the metro (puts London completely to shame) over to Central and headed for the railway. It was about 30 degrees in the heat and we figured after fighting through 40+ in India this would be easy going, but sure enough we were hot and manky within minutes of leaving the aircon. Still we persevered, stopping off at only a couple of the thousands of shopping centers for aircon respite along the way!

Sadly for us the cable car was closed for maintenance, so we had to get a bus instead. When we got to the top we faced yet another shopping centre - seriously these guys dont miss a single opporunity for shopping based fun - and bizarrely a Madame Tussauds. With it barely being a week since our Himalayan exploits, we launched straight up the road to the very top of the peak - and for once we were the only mad fools really trying. The view was breath taking though, its a 360 degree panorama from the many small islands all the way around to the towering skyscrapers of Hong Kong island itself.





We thought it would be fun to walk down, but it turned out to be a right old mission. At one point we came across the mid-level escalator, a great idea for shipping people into downtown from the residential bits nearer the hills. Sadly for us it only runs downwards during the morning, so we had to get all the way down the hard way. Still, we did find some lovely back streets, with shops selling all sorts of crazy dried foods and other colourful places like this one :



That night we hit the town and attempted to find some authentic char sui buns. For the uninitiated, these are a type of tasty savory dim sum, and we quite often fill our faces full of them in the Ping Pong restaurants in St Katherine's Dock and Oxford Circus back home. The guide book seemed to suggest we'd be falling over places that sold them, but to be honest we couldn't really find anywhere. (With a few days more local knowledge, it seems to be more of a breakfast thing, and sometimes only on certain days.) We did manage to find a nice dim sum place though, and tried out some really tasty bits that we hand't had before - but sadly no char sui. One for another day.

The area we are staying is classic picture territory, just as we'd imagined HK to be:



The next day we made it onto the famous star ferry, definitely the nicest way to travel between Kowloon and Hong Kong island.



The views are amazing; we'd already noticed the locals fastidious cleaning habits (for example when leaving a shop, its not uncommon to see a sign saying "These door handles are sterilised four times daily") but seriously they must clean the windows of the shiny buildings at least a couple of times a day to make it all gleam this much.



We took another walk around central, and headed to the proper botanical gardens to relax a bit in the heat. Unfortunately Alex wasn't feeling to good again so we had to head home, but again the views - from lush greenery back to the world of skyscrapers and high consumerism - were fantastic.



In the afternoon I decided to do something a little more radical about the heat, but you might have to try and spot what in the next photo. Alex had another nap, and that night we hit the local town again for some really tasty sushi.



Thats about it for our Hong Kong adventure - we originally hoped to spend 5 days here but the flight dates and times conspired to make that really only 3 days sadly. We've got another stop back here on the way down to Vietnam from China in a month, so we might extend that a little and see some more sites.

So tomorrow its off to mainland China - starting in Shanghai. It sounds like its history and character are very much bound to Hong Kong's, so we are expecting more of the same, and definitely looking forwards to it.

Bye for now!

Adventuring in the mountains

After our first night in Shimla we decided to sign up for 3 day trip with the trekking company that worked in the hotel we were staying in. I was a little apprehensive about this as the second day involved a full day hike up a mountain... what with my poor old legs being more accustomed to stomping around an office rather than the great outdoors these days. But Alex was really excited to do it, so it was time to suck it up and get on with it =)

In one respect it was an easy decision, as it turns out that staying in a little room with no running water is something of a smelly affair (until we worked out how to make the toilet work using water from buckets) so the thought of moving on wasn't so bad. It was a shame there wasn't more to do in Shimla, as it really is a lovely little place - very quaint in a Alpine meets India kind of way. There were no touts or rickshaws there to hassle us, and there were loads of Indian tourists doing pretty much the same stuff as us.



It was really nice at night too, there were so many villages dotted around the entire area look like it was lit up with fairy lights.



So after one day in Shimla, we woke up early and got in the car. There were two people on our mission with us, our hirsute guide Arif, and a mute driver whose name we never found out. We were all squeezed into a little white car (a maruti suzuki, a really really common car in India it would seem) and set off on the 6 hour trip towards Sarahan.

The roads were classic mountain switchbacks pretty much the entire way. The road from our hotel was so steep the driver had to take a run up, and anyone who dared to step into the road was met with a fierce barrage of beeping. Fortunately as the roads became clearer he calmed down a bit and turned out to be our best driving experience yet.

We stopped at a few good viewing spots on the way, but unfortunately the weather was really cloudy that first day. This was good in some respects as the journey was relatively cool and not half as uncomfortable as the train ride two days earlier. We stopped for lunch on the way but that was about it for entertainment along the way.

Finally we arrived in Sarahan and settled into our little room - it had a lovely view of the mountains but it was still very cloudy so we could see that much. The town itself was tiny, you'd only really go there on an organised tour. That evening our guide took us on a shortish walk around the town, visiting its famous temple (apparently one of the last places in India to abandon human sacrfices as the temple is a monument to the blood thirsty Hindu goddess Kali.)



There was a bit of hill climbing involved in the walk, which gave us a little taste of what was to come the next day - Alex was walking and smiling quite happily but I was already out of breath and lagging behind... bah!

After a big old dinner (I was getting really worried at this stage, kept going on about carb loading like I was about to run a marathon or something...) we had an early night to be ready for the trek the next day.

We set out at 10am and started up the mountain. Sarahan town is at an altitude of about 2000 metres above sea level, and the peak of the hill we were attempting was over 3000, so there was quite a bit to do. The terrain was a lovely mix of rocks, dirt tracks, tree-y bits and lush green slopes - and the weather was pretty much perfect too - a nice breeze and not too much sun. After a while the sounds of the town faded away and we really were in the perfect calm of the mountain.



Our guide explained that there were people living all over the mountains, gypsies from all over the Himalayan areas. Sure enough we joined by some young lads who were on their way back from selling milk to the town in the morning - our guide explained they did the trip down and back up the mountain every single day in order to support their families up in the hills. After a few hours we came to a small encampment, where our guide took us for tea with some of the locals...



Onwards and upwards was the only option, but the going was getting a bit tough for me. Alex was still going strong and was clearly teachers pet - apparently the guide kept saying she could climb Everest if she wanted to =) We had a few bits of picnic lunch with us from the hotel, and we also learned a crazy new way of eating mangoes without a knife... handy.

I'm sad to admit it but I was definitely the weakest link, and before long my constant stopping meant we couldn't reach the peak... we did make it up to about 2800m though and the views were lovely. The clouds came back out around lunchtime and the journey down was a race against time as the rain would mean it would turn into a perilous bum slide down in the mud if we didn't make it! This almost killed me, and my legs really haven't recovered yet... lol. It was really tough going but I'm glad we did it, I'll look back on it with good memories!

By the time we'd got back to the hotel and had some sleep, the rain and clouds had vanished completely. The full view of the snow capped peaks was revealed from our hotel roof :



Small aside - my crazy traveling beard is coming on nicely... =)



We had dinner on the roof of the hotel, and the sunset was amazing...



The last day was back in the car again, with achy legs but happy hearts. We had another overnight stay in Shimla before we had to get the train back to Delhi. The trains back seemed to take a lifetime but we made it back in one piece, back to now familiar Delhi. We've been here three times now so it feels a bit like our base, looking forwards to the nice bars and restaraunts to visit now we are back in civilisation!

3 days to go till our next mission to Hong Kong....and no doubt our next update, definitley looking forwards to a change of cuisine now, char sui buns all the way!

Although theres been ups and downs, overall India has been a terrific experience and we're both glad it was part of the trip. We've got a few days left for sightseeing here, so its time to sign off!