It’s been such a busy week I don’t really know how to start, so I’ll take Maria Von Trapp’s advice an choose the very beginning, since the last post anyway, which was Dali.

With James reduced to only one technological gadget (his mobile phone) tensions were running high, so when we arrived in Dali we proceeded straight to the police station to register the loss of Ruby and our other stuff. It was a long drawn out afternoon (six hours from start to finish) but the Dali police could not have been nicer. They arranged for an interpreter to come and meet us then drove us down to the new town, half an hour away from where we were staying, to register our police report. There was a very sinister looking chair with attached handcuffs and ankle shackles in the interrogation room which made us a bit edgy at first, but the interpreter assured us that our wrists and ankles were too big for it so they let us sit in normal chairs and go through the painful process of describing Ruby (small, shiny, covered in flag stickers) and her playmates. We emerged a few hours later with some official looking froms, all marked with a big red police stamp and, amusingly, James’ fingerprints, which he was asked to press over his signature on each version of our statements. Our interpreter must have noticed the sceptical look on James’ face as his fingers were being dipped unceremoniously into the red ink pad because he asked ‘don’t they do this in your country?’. James replied ‘only to criminals’, which the police found hilarious. When we were all done they found a couple of on duty PCs to drive us back to Dali old town in a police van – they didn’t speak a word of English but they both grinned at us, stuck the flashing lights on and jumped every traffic light on the way. We felt as though Interpol were after us.

Faith in Chinese authority partially restored, we spent a couple of days wandering through the very picturesque, packed streets of Dali old town, which are permanently teeming with well-heeled Chinese tourists and a handful of foreign backpackers. Dali has a beautiful mountain and lake backdrop and the old town is a perfectly preserved jumble of old buildings and cobbled streets – despite the many souvenir shops and the constant chaos of people it was a nice, easy place to recover from a miserable few days. There was even an English run bar (Bad Monkey – highly recommended) with live bands and a free pool table; perfect.

We’d planned to spend a few days hiking in the mountains then carry on North east to Lijiang but, for all manner of reasons that I won’t bore you with, we decided over several beers that we’d hit the six month travel fatigue barrier and we needed to be stationary for a little while. So we’re off to Beijing for a a few months. Running around like headless chickens at the moment trying to organise ourselves (James is madly gaffer taping his wounded rucksack) so I’ll continue when we get to Beijing…