Start your engines! (Courtney)

We are a mere week and a bit away from starting our adventure around China, so I thought I'd do a post on where we are actually going.

Today we headed down to the train ticket office to try and get our tickets for Beijing. Mr Pan had recommended that we go down between the 1st and 3rd of July so off we went this morning. Buying train tickets we have so far found incredibly easy. I mean, stupidly easy. The ticket office is this shoebox size place down the street, with just a counter and a timetable on the wall. I really thought we would never be understood or get what we want, as you always read of absolute horror stories of foreigners trying to purchase tickets. So far though, so good. Who knows if our luck will continue on our travels, but the ticket office in our area is great. Well, the service can be a little lacking (as in the guy this morning completely ignored us until I just thrust all of our stuff through the window to him to make him pay attention) but it's fast and easy. We also found a website that lists every single train in China - you just key in your destinations and it tells you train numbers, times and costs. This makes things infinitely easier when you get to the ticket office. We ask in Chinese then hand over the train number and wham bam thank you maam!

Hi ho hi ho..it's off to Beijing we go!

So above is a map of where we are actually heading. The lines in red are our route, the lines in green are two places we hope to still get too. Well....in saying "we" I really mean "I" when it comes to the location on the far left. I really, REALLY want to see Kashgar, which is about as far west as you can get in China, but obviously it's out of the question this time around. What with the distance, and the fact it is on the border of Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan it would be ridiculously hot!!

So, I digress. From Wuxi (in between Shanghai and Nanjing) we head overnight to Beijing. We have 7 nights in Beijing, which should give us ample time to see everything. Beijing should be looking pretty good now, what with the lead up to the Olympics. From Beijing we will get another overnight train to Xi'an. Xi'an was once the capital of China, and has a lot of history. It also has a large Muslim population and supposedly one of the best remaining Muslim quarters in the country, renowned for it's food. What's even more exciting is that we have decided to live it up and stay in a hotel in Xi'an...which has a pool!! So really, once we check out the food and the Terracotta Warriors I basically wont be leaving the water for the next few days ;-)

From Xi'an it will be onto Chengdu for a week. Chengdu has been one of our must see places since we decided to come to China, and was a place we originally looked for work in. Chengdu is known for being home to the panda and teahouses. It is supposedly very laid back, to the point where other Chinese have a tendency to think of the people as being lazy. Chengdu is part of the Sichuan province, also well known for chillies - and lots of them! The food should be amazing, and our Chinese friend Josh has restaurant owning family down there, so hopefully we will tee something up with him. Sadly the large panda reserve (which is a long way out of town) was damaged in the earthquake, I think a number of the pandas have been relocated, so we will have to stick to the smaller panda centre which is closer to town. The surrounding around of Chengdu has lots of beautiful sites and I think it will be a highlight of the trip.

From Chengdu, it is then even further down south to Yunnan province, near Vietnam. We start off in Kunming, where we will be joining an Intrepid tour which does a little triangle route throughout the province. The tour goes for 9 days and takes in Kunming, Dali, Lijiang, Tiger Leaping Gorge and Zhongdian, known nowadays as Shangri-La. We are both so excited about this part of our journey. Yunnan province we hear is one of the most beautiful areas of China, you would know it if you saw pictures - all the huge karst stones, mountains, yangzi river etc. It should be green and lush and clean! I am hanging to see Lijiang, which I fell in love with when I saw it Kylie Kwong's latest book on her travels through China. It looks like a beautiful old town, cobblestone lanes, little creeks. Zhongdian looks amazing too. This is the largest Tibetan town outside of the Tibetan province. It looks very remote. When we were organising the trip Tibet was still closed, with no sign of it being reopened prior to the Olympics. However it has just reopened last week, but we will not have time to go there. From Kunming we will then fly back to good old Wuxi, where we will have a good two weeks before teaching starts again. I think we will be buggered by the time we get home, and will probably be thankful for some days at home. We are travelling around 9,000 kms which is a fair effort but certainly worth it.

All that remains is for us to buy our packs and we will be ready to go!