I shall begin the first blog from China with an understatement of epic proportions: it’s really, really big. I knew it was big before we crossed, of course – it looks massive on the map, it’s bigger than India and it holds 1.3 billion people. But it wasn’t until we’d spent five hours on a rickety, smoke-filled bus, passing through a wilderness of mountains, rivers and villages,  just to reach the first town of any significance (apart from the border town of Hekou)  that I realised just how insanely stupid it was to think we can see much of China in a month – extending our visas is a priority.

The bus ride was an interesting affair thanks to a punctured tyre and some rather gravelly roads, but by mid-afternoon we’d arrived in Yuanyang, a fairly large town remotely perched in the Yunnanese hills, surrounded by beautiful, vast, sweeping rice terraces for which it’s known. Although there were a handful of Western travellers milling around the town centre, non-domestic tourism still hasn’t really penetrated the area (it was off limits until the nineties due to several Sino-Vietnamses conflicts) so my pidgin Mandarin got a good early workout as we went through the process of booking a room, getting dinner (spare ribs and steamed rice, delicious) and figuring out how to get to the terraces. I’ve been trying hard to master enough Mandarin to get by but I’m learning from an American series which seems to think that shopping, telling the time and fending off unwanted male attention are the most important aspects of communication, so I know how to say ‘please give me some dollars, I want to buy shoes’ and ‘I do not want to go to lunch with you at all’ but not ‘which is the right bus please’.

We had a pleasant two nights in Yuanyang, acclimatising to the country and trying to identify the many different ethnic minorities who wander around the town in their beautiful bright clothes, then we headed off over more mountains for the four hour trip to Jianshui, a town that looks like an utter dump from the bus station but has a beautiful old town full of ancient buildings that are either being restored and opened to the public or turned into shoe shops…every other business here seems to sell shoes or electronic goods (especially mobile phones and rice cookers). There were plenty of Chinese tourists milling around the centre but once again we spotted very few Westerners, although I suspect this will change soon, as the town seems to be undergoing a major face lift for the purposes of luring more visitors. We spent one evening there wandering around the old city gate, amongst the bamboo pipe smokng men and groups of women dancing to guitar music – bizarrely, they looked a bit like they were morris dancing – the headed off to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, where we’re holed up at the moment in a huge hostel conveniently located over about six nightclubs.

One thing that has been a bit of a challenge for the last few days has been feeding ourselves cheaply…we usually tend to stick to street kitchens and grubby little restaurants to keep costs down, which means relying on pot luck a bit to see what we get since my limited Mandarin does not extend to translating Chinese characters. It’s usually the more upmarket places that have English menus so last night, to celebrate six months on the road, we wandered into rather a smart restaurant full of locals slurping steaming soup from enormous bowls – the staff seemed pleased to see a pair of tourists and treated us like royalty, fetching beer and tea before we’d even asked and digging out a translated menu.

You know you’re in for an interesting culinary experience when you’re given a bunsen burner, a pair of chopsticks, a ladle, a straw and a pair of rubber gloves, plus an extremely extensive menu containing chef’s recommendations of big bone special and spicy duck throats. The general idea seemed to be that you ordered a pot of stock with your choice of meat, noodles and veg to throw in. James did the choosing (going for chicken stock plus prawns, beef, cabbage and mushrooms) and a few moments later were presented with a vat (I’m not joking, it was massive) of cloudy, delicious smelling stock which was set on the burner to boil. Next came the raw prawns, beef, and vegetables, ready to throw in when the stock was hot enough, plus an evil selection of chilli and garlic sauce. Then, finally, came the chickeny bit of the stock…an entire, ash broiled chicken complete with head, feet, wings, and all other anatomical apendages. Our waiter chopped him up with a flourish and dumped him into the vat…it made the process of ladelling out the soup ever so much more exciting knowing that at any moment you might be confronted by a beady eye and a blackened beak.

It was without doubt one of the best meals of the trip, and the rubber gloves were a stroke of genius, because things did get a bit messy – I can’t even eat an ice cream without ending up wearing it, so after tackling boiling soup, chicken’s feet, raw prawns and killer chilli, my hands were pretty much the only clean bit of me. It wasn’t until we were leaving that I realised I’d made a mistake using my straw to drink my tea; on the next table were four pretty Chinese girls sucking the marrow out of an enormous beef bone. I can’t wait for lunch today.