China

We arrived in Shanghai from Tokyo by a rather circuitous route via Hong Kong and Beijing. Shanghai is mainland China's most modern city. That means lots of shopping malls selling designer clothes, restaurants where you can buy very expensive coffee and high rise buildings.

After a brief detour to buy replacements for some of our more horrific looking clothes we went to the Bund. This is Shanghai's riverside walkway flanked by colonial period buildings. What none of the guide books mention is that there is a huge noisy motorway between the riverside walkway and the colonial buildings. In any case, the stifling heat and pollution made it no fun to walk anywhere so we headed across the river to Pudong.

Jinmao tower is the tallest of Pudong's skyscrapers, in fact it is the tallest building in China, and looks like a very long modern pagoda. Extremely fast lifts took us up to a viewing platform on the 88th floor where we got a great view out across a hazy Shanghai. There was also an amazing if vertigo inducing view down through the atrium to the bar in the Grand Hyatt hotel on the 54th floor. We were soon looking at the view from the other direction, as we sipped long island iced teas!

From Shanghai we flew to Xian where we met up with two friends from London, Lin and Andy. Although Xian was the ancient capital of China not much remains of the old town within the city walls. The real attraction are the Terracotta warriors just outside of Xian. These are thousands of life size statues of soldiers and horses who were buried underground to guard the tomb of the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang.

At the site we looked around different pits filled with hundreds of soldiers. Some were unbroken, some had been restored and some were lying in pieces in the pits, fragments of heads and hands sticking up at funny angles. The soldiers were undeniably interesting but the site itself could have been a bit better presented. Each soldier was for example originally buried with a realistic life size weapon but not a single one was shown, not even in the adjacent museum. Apparently they are all in storage somewhere!

In Xian itself, an unexpectedly beautiful place was the Great Mosque. To get to it we walked down a narrow alley way, where strange odds and ends like Mao's little red book and Mao watches with waving arms were on sale. The mosque itself was in a Chinese style with gardens but with Arabic inscriptions, a very calm place to relax away from the heat and noise of Xian's streets.

Our 'hard' seat train tickets from Xian to Pingyao seemed incredibly cheap for a 12 hour train journey. As we tried to push and shove our way on to the train we worked out why. The carriage was heaving and our reserved seats were already filled with people who didn't look like they were particularly interested in getting up to make way for us. Fortunately the miniscule but assertive train guard, shouted a lot and shoved people until our seats were vacated. She then organized the rearrangement of everyone's luggage until places were found to squeeze our ruck sacks in. I put mine beneath our seat but had to move it when Steve noticed that some one had moved in to sleep next to it.

We finally arrived in Pingyao late at night absolutely exhausted and covered in the dirt that had flown in through the train window. Driving through the streets to our hotel though was a magical experience. Pingyao was built during the Ming dynasty (1368 - 1643 AD) and I don't think that it has changed a lot since. There were no lights in the streets and as we drove through the old city walls we could just make out the old buildings and gates in the narrow alleyways. Our hotel was itself very beautiful and we had to walk through a series of courtyards to get to our room.

Pingyao was a different sort of China to the one that we had seen in Shanghai and Xian. It was nice just to wander the streets and watch people playing cards and hanging out. We also went for a walk right round the still intact city walls. There were many small museums and temples in Pingyao. For us the highlight was the Pingyao County Government Office Building. More like a small town than a building there were law courts, a prison, accommodation for officials, gardens and exhibitions of torture instruments as well as modern photography.

I should say at this point that we were spending quite a lot of time eating. I have always thought that I didn't like Chinese food because most of stuff I have had in England has been heavily laden with mono sodium glutamate and basically not very nice. Instead in China we were ordering lots of very tasty different tofu and vegetable dishes as well as different types of dumplings to dip in vinegar, all for next to nothing!

We also found people in China extremely friendly. Initially China was a bit of a shock after Japan, as people don't spend any time bowing and saying thank you. Rather than forming neat lines as they queue they are more likely to elbow you out of the way as they push in front of you! That said in some ways it was a bit of a relief as we didn't have to put on too many airs and graces ourselves.

A lot of Chinese people seemed very curious about us and wanted to chat even if their only English was 'England, Beckham good'. We found ourselves helping to correct English essays and admiring people's babies. Andy's feet, which are a size 16, caused quite a stir whenever they were noticed.

Children are made a big fuss over in China. Most kids, male or female, look extremely well looked after and are constantly being hugged or kissed by somebody. One thing that I found a little difficult to get used to however was that babies don't wear nappies. Instead they have holes cut in their trousers. I couldn't work out how this worked. I mean how do the parents know when the baby needs to go to the toilet? We watched one baby score a direct hit on his mum's lap, proving that whatever the system it doesn't always work!

Although China is not a democracy, as visitors the only tangible evidence we saw of this were the restrictions on internet use, which we nicknamed the Great Firewall of China. The choice of sites to be blocked seemed a little odd. We couldn't access this blog or any BBC sites including BBC Sport but we could get through to the Guardian web site. This left us reading relentlessly negative coverage of England's performance in the world cup!

After Pingyao we caught the train up to Beijing, fortunately we had a decent bunk each this time! I visited Beijing with my mum and brother as a child in 1987 so I was quite interested to see how much I could remember and how much Beijing had changed. At that time you had to come on an organized tour so in addition to all the usual tourist sites we went to visit a silk factory and a kindergarten. I was ten years old and everywhere I went people wanted to take my photo and touch my hair, which was blond when I was a kid. I thought that China was great!

The most obvious difference I noticed was that where once the streets of Beijing were crowded with bicycles they are now crowded with cars. Lots of the traditional areas or Hutongs have also been demolished since the 1980s to make way for high rise buildings and the shopping malls are definitely a new arrival!

One of Steve's friends Chris, who also works at the same architecture practice, was in Beijing with an Engineer called Tim, as they had been working on a bridge project together in Xian. We met up at our hotel and after a brief stop in Tiananmen Square we took a taxi to look at the construction site where they are building the Olympic Stadium. Personally I thought that it would be better to wait and come back and see it when it was finished, but the others had a great time!

There are some amazing sites to see in Beijing. The most impressive for me was the Forbidden City. This is where the Emperor of China used to live. It's called the Forbidden City because ordinary people did not use to be allowed in and because it really is the size of a city. We walked round a whole series of courtyards and gardens and temples and throne rooms as well as the living accommodation of the Emperor. His principle wives all used to live quite close to one another, which must have made for a difficult atmosphere. Some of the buildings were closed for restoration, but there was still so much to see that we couldn't walk round it all in four hours.

After visiting the Forbidden City we went to a bar by Houhai Lake to watch England go out of the World Cup to Portugal. Lin and Andy had been completely oblivious that the World Cup was even happening until we got them interested just in time to watch England lose on penalties as usual!

We spent the next day visiting the Summer Palace which is a enormous complex of gardens and palaces with a huge lake in the middle where the Emperor used to spend the summer.

On our last day in Beijing we took a bus to see the Great wall of China. It was exactly as I remember it except a lot steeper! Unfortunately the weather was not that clear but we still got the idea that the wall went on for a long way. Whoever got the idea of building a wall across the mountains of Northern China must have been completely mad. Not only must the construction work have been nearly impossible to carry out but as it is nearly vertical in places it was hardly ideal for rushing troops along.

After a final evening watching acrobats do impossible looking things in a Beijing theatre it was time to say goodbye to Andy and Lin and move on to Mongolia. We passed the Great Wall and the mountains in the train and then went through the desert in Inner Mongolia before arriving at the Mongolian border after 13 hours. The trains have different gauges in Mongolia so we spent an hour in a shed having our train lifted up and the bogie (wheel assembly) changed before finally crossing the border.