China round-up part 1 (Tom)

Tomorrow we catch the boat down the Mekong to Thailand so it's time for a conclusion to this leg of our 2 month China journey.

It's a big country - not sure but I think we've covered around 5000 miles by train, bus, taxi and boat. And despite the spendour of the endless great wall which we first picked up on the train to Beijing, it has been the little things that have made China a bit different.

The 'tellible' English, the staff dance or excercise routines outside restaurants, the corn and chillis left to dry on the brand new dual carriageway as a donkey wanders down the fast lane. The huge cities have been polluted, but the small villages of Tibet and Yunnan like nowhere else. The cave dwellers and the mud huts more inspiring than the endless high rise suburbs.

We've been to all 4 points of the compass, from sea level to the roof of the world. On a good day you can laugh and enjoy the spitting, smoking whilst eating, endless shouting, animal teasing, staring and unbelievable filthiness of this country. On a bad day it has made us want to be anywhere else. But for me, it has been incredible to see a country in the middle of it's own industrial revolution. Cows grazing on the expensively laid lawns, men in suits ploughing the fields.

And we wouldn't have wanted to travel to Thailand any other way.