Western Australia

We've just spent a week in Western Australia, which has been very different to all our time in Asia. It came as a bit of a shock! Especially as we spent most of it with Kate's family, who looked after us amazingly well, even feeding us oysters and champagne - we're not used to such luxury!

The morning after we arrived we were taken out waterskiing. Kate was great at it and managed to stand up for ages, but I didn't. Think it's harder when you're tall... I did much better at the doughnuts and only fell off once. Kate didn't fall off at all - of course.

After a couple of days exploring Perth with Kate's Uncle Ian, we hired a car and headed south to Margaret River, the big wine growing area. We went on a great 'Bushtucker' wine tour, which involved Kate getting a little tipsy and me eating a wichity grub (delicious - tastes like peanut butter, looked horrible). While down in the south west, we also went to a beautiful cave and to the forests of giant karri and tingle trees. There was a really cool, but very wobbly, tree top walk. Next stop was Albany and the incredible coastline with natural blowholes and bridges.

We did well spotting Australian wildlife: kangaroos, emus, possums, kookaburras, and we cheated a little by seeing koalas, wombats and dingos at Cahuna Wildlife Park back in Perth. The place was a little run down, but the kangaroos and wallabys were very tame, so you could hand feed them which was fun.

While in Perth, we also managed to get to Scarborough and Cottesloe beaches to watch the surfers and eat fish and chips (different over here, they use snapper - yum!).

Our last couple of days in the west were spent on Rottnest Island. It's a beautiful place, with great beaches and bays. The weather was wonderful so were able to snorkel. It was a bit chilly, but there were loads of fish. While I was scuba diving, Kate saw a dolphin - I'm not jealous though, the underwater caverns were cool! Loads more wildlife here too: ospreys, oystercatchers, snakes, lizards, quokkas (they're not rats, they're not kangaroos!) and a huge sting ray.

We were really sad to leave Ian and Jenny yesterday as we had such a great time with them. Was even worse when we arrived at our accomodation in Sydney at midnight last night. We've already checked out, and are off to find somewhere a little less smelly!

Beijing and the Great Wall

After Xian, we visited Pingyao, an ancient walled city. I spent most of our time there in bed with a cold, but Kate told me it was pretty nice - lots of old buildings. Not too much to do there though, so we quickly moved onto Datong. Not the most charming of cities, but just out of town there are some caves with Buddhist carvings. They were incredible, thousands of buddhas all over the walls - did wonders for our giant stone buddha count!

Beijing has been cool, once it stopped raining. We tried not to get beaten by the weather, but lost after getting drenched at a market, and came back to the hostel and watched DVDs for the day. We treated ourselves that evening with a Peking Duck feast. Delicious, one of the best meals we're had in Asia, but ate far too much!

We've done lots of touristy stuff: the Forbidden City, Tiannamen Square (although we didn't see Mao), but the highlight was the Olympic Stadium. We could only see it from across a busy road, but it was very cool. To console ourselves for not being able to see the games, we've bought loads of Olympic souvenirs instead. The mascots are great!

Speaking of great... The Great Wall of China really was great. We were on a trip organised by our hostel to the 'Secret Wall' - a stretch of unrestored wall which no other tour groups go to. It was spectacular with incredible views, there really was no one else there! It was very windy on top of the wall, and with some sections being really ruined it was a bit scary at times. Lots of fun though.

We're off to the airport shortly for our flight to Perth. Our four months in Asia has gone really quickly, but it's been amazing. Will miss the chopsticks and the cheap beer, but not the squat toilets!

Giant Pandas, Giant Buddas and Giant Terracotta Warriors

Pandas are cute. Kind of stupid, but very cute. We visited a Panda breeding centre just out of Chengdu - Kate was very excited. So was I, they were great. As far as we can tell, pandas are perfectly evolved for sleeping and eating. Everything else (reproduction, walking) seems to be a bit trickier. They're not really helping themselves survive!

The next day our bus broke down. Not quite as dramatic a story, it was just a city bus, and another one pulled up a few minutes later, but it had us worried for a moment! We were on our way to Leshan, home to the world's biggest buddha. It's pretty big - 71 metres high. There were huge crowds of Chinese tourists, all armed with cameras and elbows... not all bad mind you, one guy gave us pea flavoured lollys. (That's a lolly that tastes of peas.) We got round the corner and quickly threw them away!

Our last day in Chengdu was wet, and we got drenched while walking the streets looking for an art gallery. We didn't find it, and just went back to the hostel and browsed the internet, while waiting for our train to Xian.

Which is where we are now! We saw the Terracotta Army yesterday - it's cool. Definitely one of the best things we've seen in China, although I think we both expected a bit more. It's all a bit dated now - the 360 degree cinema would have been more impressive when it was new, 15 years ago, and the buildings are all plain grey concrete. However, when you see the army itself, you forget it all! They stand in a 200m long hanger, and are incredibly detailed. Again, there were loads of tourists and Kate's enjoying the pushing and shoving a little too much!

Xian itself is a nice city. Lots of shopping and bargaining to be done, and we've found some great street food including fried pancakes, lamb kebabs and duck sandwiches. In fact, I think it's lunchtime!

63 hours on a bus

We made it to Chengdu... 63 hours after we started. It should have taken about 24 hours, but turned into a bit of a nightmare.

Our first sleeper bus was ok, even managed to sleep a bit and we arrived in the town where we had to change buses at about 5 am (12 hours). As we were packing up, someone grabbed Kate's iPod out of her open bag - just turned away for a second. We needed to report it to the police for our insurance, so headed to town and got ripped off in a taxi (charged double). We had a couple of hours to wait for the police station to open, so figured we'd get some breakfast. We went to a local cafe, where the owner spoke no English but kept bringing us different food to try. Really nice - and cost less than a pound! Finally met a police guy who spoke pretty good English, but it took ages to file the report. We were left in the Police Chief's office, and amused ourselves playing I-Spy and Charades. The worst of it was that we were kept waiting for over an hour while the rubber stamping machine was being repaired... couldn't they stamp it by hand?!

Got back to the bus station at about 12 to find that the next bus (which we thought were hourly) didn't leave till 3pm. A filthy little bus which made ominous noises and moved frustratingly slowly. I think we only covered about 200km in the first 4 or 5 hours.

At about 3 or 4am, we stopped. The driver came and had a sleep in the seat behind us. We figured he'd been driving a long time and needed a rest. A couple of hours later (daylight), we started reversing! We reversed a few km back to a town with a garage. Everyone had to get off the bus and help to push it into the garage... (I think it was stuck in gear or forward was broken?). The mechanic was pretty quick in removing the gearbox... people didn't seem very happy. But with us not speaking Chinese, it was very difficult to work out the problem. Using the Lonely Planet language pages we realised we'd be here a while, but other people were waiting too... so we thought - Ok.

It was about 8am now. We waited around this garage... dusty, oily (our clothes were filthy by the end)... people were very friendly and bought us snacks, even paying for us when we tried to buy our own. We were still waiting at 6pm when people started going for food. They insisted we went with them, and wouldn't let us pay. We all went to a local restaurant, passengers and the bus staff, and had a great meal... loads of food. Lots of photos being taken, high spirits, and we felt sure that the bus would be ready when we got back. Not quite...

We hadn't noticed that when we'd pushed the bus, we'd left it very neatly parked. Turned out that another bus would be arriving for us at 2am. So back on the bus for a sleep.

Unloaded our bags at 1am, and waited, not overly confident that anything would arrive... but it did, and it was full. I managed to get a seat at the back (with guys sleeping on my shoulder), but Kate had to stand for 3 hours before a seat came free - being careful not to stand on a box of kittens! Kate says "chivalry is dead in China" - we couldn't swap places as it was so tightly packed. (That's my excuse) We even had the broken gearbox on the bus!

We finally arrived in town at around 7am. Everyone was very nice, helped withour bags and waved us off... they'd been really friendly, even when we were getting stressed. We were sad to say goodbye. Got a couple of guy's phone numbers - not sure how the conversation will work?!

Took a taxi to the hostel, and ran to the shower... we were both so dirty and sweaty after spending a day on the roadside! Have now had a sleep, done our washing, had a meal and feel much better. Think we'll watch a film this evening and have the beer that we've been promising ourselves for the last 30 hours.

I think we'll take the train from now on.

One Week in Yunnan

It's cold! We're in Shangri La, in the mountains on the edge of Tibet - the town's at around 3200m. Pretty quiet, not many tourists... can't think why? Everyone we've spoken to has said it's quite safe for tourists here, apart from the cold.

We've been in China for about 7 days now, and really love it. We left Vietnam via a town called Sapa, also in the mountains. Wasn't quite as cold, but very misty, so we didn't quite get the epic views we hoped for. Nice though, and met lots of people from the local villages.

Crossing the Chinese border was fun - we were asked to show the offical all of the books in our bags. If we hadn't have disguised our Lonely Planet with the the cover from an Indian guidebook, it would have been confiscated, and we'd have been lost and hungry - especially since our next challenge was ordering a meal in a local restaurant! It was pretty disorienting to start with, but once we realised we could buy food and a bus ticket, we felt much more confident.

Our first city was Kunming - it's a pretty small city, by Chinese standards. Pretty big by ours. We stayed in a great guesthouse, called The Hump, where we met loads of cool people. Had a great night out in a nearby bar (which sold cans of Boddingtons), then went onto a club with an English guy and his Chinese girlfriend. Great fun - you order beer by the dozen!

We overslept. Woke up the next day at 12 - the same time we should have been checking out. So it seemed sensible to have a lazy day around the hostel before catching our overnight bus.

Lijiang is one of the prettiest towns we've been too, lots of traditional Chinese (Naxi) buildings, canals with fish, and lots of Chinese tourists. Spent a couple of days wandering round the streets taking far too many photographs, as usual. Just outside the town is a beautiful park around a lake formed by a natural spring. The water was perfectly clear and you could see hundreds of Koi carps. The lake was surrounded by some wonderful pagodas, and was really quiet, mainly due to the extortionate ticket prices.

Next stop was Tiger Leaping Gorge for a bit more trekking. It's a great place, with incredible scenery from the snow capped mountains, to the rapids rushing through the 20m wide - 4000m deep gorge. We trekked for 2 days with some really nice English guys we met in Lijiang. Hard work, but great fun, and Kate only freaked out once - after climbing a vertical ladder up the gorge!

China's been really great so far, and we've another 3 weeks to go. Not looking forward to the 25 hour bus journey to Chengdu though, I'm sure there'll be a lot to write about after that!

Halong Bay and Hanoi

We had another long overnight bus trip to Hanoi from Hue. It was quite an exciting one, though, as the bus' rear window shattered at about 1am and covered Paul in glass! I think it must have been a very big stone that did it. The bus guy tried to solve the problem by drawing the curtains and our journey was accompanied by the tinkle of falling glass until they stopped an hour later and covered the hole with tarpaulin!

We like Hanoi. It is big and bustling and there is lots of bia hoi. We've also seen some beautiful pagodas and Ho Chi Minh's mausaleum (didn't go in though!). I think Paul and Ben got a bit sick of pagodas, but cheered themselves up with some KFC!

We did a 3 day, 2 night trip to Halong Bay. It was really beautiful and really peaceful sailing around the islands and rocks in our junk. We visited a huge, beautiful cave and Cat Ba island National Park, where we saw tiny frogs! My favourite thing was kayaking in the rain. We kayaked to a really beautiful lagoon and managed not to capsize, either. Karaoke seems to be a pretty big thing here still and Paul and Ben did a couple of beautiful duets in the evening!

We're back in Hanoi now and are getting an overnight train to Sapa, in the mountains, in a couple of hours. We've spent the day buying toiletries and supplies for China. Ben's headed off to Laos, so its just the two of us again - I'm sure it'll be fine!

Made to Measure

We've had a great week - diving and shopping!

We went to Nha Trang, on the beach, and Ben perusaded us to go on a diving trip. Kate went snorkelling, and I did an 'introduction to scuba diving' - which meant that another guy pushed me around underwater, all I had to do was breathe! Really enjoyed it, so decided to do the four day PADI diving course: 2 days in the classroom and pool, and 2 days diving. First day in Nha Trang and the rest further up the coast in Hoi An.

A long overnight bus journey to get there, but we had a bed-bus so managed to get a bit of sleep. Arrived at 8am, the next day of my course started at 10. The diving wasn't quite as good in Hoi An, colder and less fish, but I'm now a certified scuba diver! Looking forward to Australia and the Cook Islands... if I wasn't already.

The main attraction of Hoi An, however, is shopping... so we shopped! The town is full of tailor shops, and having clothes made to measure is very addictive. We've bought some great suits, coats and dresses, just better not put any weight on before we get home.

In Hue now, off to see some tunnels from the Vietnam War tomorrow, before getting another bed-bus to Hanoi and Halong Bay. Hopefully we'll get a lie in at some point - it's another 6am start tomorrow.