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After Shanghai we decamped to Hong Kong for a day or two before we caught our various planes home. I really like Hong Kong, firstly because it's great for travellers (you can check in for your flight at the central train station and not head out to the airport yourself until hours later, by which time your bags have already been sent through), because I like being able to get the recently-released cameras and gear you actually want (and more affordably too), thirdly because I like how close you are to all sorts of different stuff – thick forest buts up against residential blocks and the expensive boring areas of town are only a couple of subway stops away from the anything-goes parts of the city.

I find it pretty strange when I tell someone that I've been to China and they ask “oh – where, Beijing and Shanghai?”. I really struggle to see why you would bother going to China and yet choose to spend your time there in Shanghai, sometimes described as the Paris of the east but perhaps better described as like all the shopping-mall-infested rich-people's cities in the west. Sure, the girls loved going shopping for clothes there, but I couldn't help feeling that you can do that in any big city and in comparison to the unique things we saw in the rest of China – we'd just come from Huangshan and Hongcun just seemed, well, boring.

Near Huangshan there are two ancient villages on the UNESCO World Heritage List, Xidi and Hongcun, and I'd arranged for us to see Hongcun before we took the train to Shanghai. Hongcun was 880 years old when we visited which when your own country is only 171 years old seems like a long long time.

After Beijing and the daytrip to visit the Great Wall we flew south to Tunxi, which is effectively the service town for the epic Huangshan (‘Yellow Mountain’) with its striking granite peaks, pine trees, and amusingly mistranslated signs.

We were in Beijing in the middle of summer and on the 11th of August it was expected to reach 34ºC. So our group decided to go hiking up and down the Great Wall for a few hours in the middle of the day :).

Another sleeper train from Xi'an to Beijing. The beds are hard, you might get an insect bite or two, but they're otherwise kinda fun. Everyone takes a big cup noodle from the store and they have a hot-water heater that you fill up from. They always seem to wake you up an hour before you get there though (to make sure you don't go past your stop) so I was always tired when we got in and pretty damn keen for a shower.

We took the sleeper train up from Yichang after the Yangtze cruise to Xi'an, capital of Shaanxi province. Xi'an was crowded and very, very badly polluted and there's only one reason tourists go there – to see the terracotta warriors.

I was pretty sick after Huanglong and Jiuzhaigou – probably thanks to the water cooler in the hotel room – and when we flew on to Chongqing I basically crawled into bed on the cruise ship and went to sleep. After two weeks of wood-like Chinese beds it was pretty much the best thing ever to have a comfortable mattress and a comfy duvet in a quiet place and I slept like a very stationary log which has had a hard week at the office.

After travelling around Chengdu area we flew on to what is described as a Tibetan area – but still in Sichuan, not in Tibet on the map. In the scenic Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture there are – or were as of 2000 – a narrow majority of ethnic Tibetans in the area.

After Guilin and Yangshuo we flew to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan – home of delicious, tasty food, giant pandas, and giant sculptures.