In Urumqi

It's pronounced "uh-rum-oo-chi". You wouldn't guess, would you?

Urumqi is 3000km from Chengdu. That's actually a pretty long journey to spend in a tiny room with two people (a middle manager and a fashion designer, if I had to guess) who share no languages with you. Once you've covered "hello" and what your names are, there aren't many conversations you can have. The hours did not fly by.

Comic relief came in the form of a coin collecting member of the kitchen staff who called in at intervals to geek out over the euro and raid my collection of foreign coins. He didn't speak english either, but he didn't let that stop him hanging out in our room and telling me lots of things I didn't understand.  It passed the time and I got free meals any time he was pushing the food trolley, so it was all good.

Other than that, I divided the time between reading, sleeping and taking a crash course in tourist Russian. ("Is this the bank?" "No, it is the theatre". "Is the train station far away?" "Yes." See? I'm sorted.)

The views out the window were pretty great. Hours and hours of sandy desert with proper sand dunes. Spiky grey snowcapped mountains in the distance. Signs in this province include Uighur, which uses the Arabic script, so I can read at last. Alphabets! They're going to be huge! Of course Uighur is yet another language that I don't speak any of, but I have a bit of Arabic and that's enough to read place names and feel like a functioning human again.

Leaving Chengdu

Chengdu is great, by the way. It's an easy place to spend time. Clean, safe, modern streets. Brand new subway. Fast internet. Probably the best hostels in the country. It's famous for its super-spicy Sichuan cuisine (I'm eating a hotpot as I write this and smoke is coming out my ears). It's near a panda reserve, the biggest Buddha in the world, and a particularly good holy mountain I've now failed to visit twice. Next time, Emei, I promise!

Chengdu takes very little energy and it's tempting to ditch my schedule and hang out for a few days. Very tempting. But onwards, upwards, chaoswards: I'm heading to the wild wild northwest. Urumqi!

My hostel in Urumqi doesn't seem to have internet. Or a ticket-booking desk. Or anyone who likes it. It has the worst reviews I've ever seen for a hostel... apart from the other hostels in Urumqi, which are much worse. Most reviews mention either mould or bad smells. Almost everyone comments on the ramshackle metal beds and the surly staff. One guy notes that he came out of the shower dirtier than he got in. It sounds so inviting! This may be a situation where I cut my losses and check into the Sheraton, but it's still worth buying a dorm bed for access to the hostel common room. Common rooms are where all the good information is.

I've a 49 hour train journey ahead of me. My train to here, the K146 from Kunming, was really nice, so I'm hoping that the smoke, crowds and blaring music on the train from Shanghai were all consequences of the holiday week. Not many people travel the week after the major holiday, so the Chengdu train was half empty and very calm. I got the bottom bunk. The guy opposite gave me a hard boiled egg. The views were good and I slept like a baby.

There's only one Chengdu-Urumqi train each day though and all of the hard sleeper (second class) seats were booked out for the next few days. I have to pay fifty quid extra for a "soft sleeper", a bunk in a comfy four-bed compartment with a door. I can probably live with that.

Kazakhstan very soon. Can I learn Russian in 49 hours?

Uploading photographs of Tiger Leaping Gorge in Chengdu

I'm at a fast computer with a mug of coffee, a modern browser and a proxy. After four days of everything interesting being blocked, the whole internet is available again! If someone could bring me a plate of cheese, I'd promise never to complain about China again.

Tiger Leaping Gorge was spectacular. The Lonely Planet was all "this is the hardest hike ever even for people who are really fit. You'll probably fall down and die, unless you're killed by bandits instead. We really don't recommend it" (I'm exaggerating. A bit.), so I almost didn't go, but of course it was completely wonderful, completely doable, completely safe. Stupid book. The first half day is all uphill, but there are only a couple of hours (the famous "28 bends" section) where you hate your life a bit. The altitude makes it a bit harder to get your breath back, but I took a lot of rests and it was mostly ok.

The various groups of us who kept passing each other out eventually made a party of eight and we reached the peak together. And stopped there, because the peak had a fantastic old woman who had set up a barricade and was charging hikers 8 yuan (somewhere between a dollar and a euro) to get to the best view. Very clever! A couple of guys in our party were inclined not to pay and there was an entertaining few minutes where she was waving a rock and shouting and they weren't sure what their options were. In the end they paid. She was half their height and she had two teeth and a rock. You'd have paid too.

The minority people who live around the gorge, the Naxi, are actually pretty enterprising about making money from hikers. Apart from the photograph extortion and good guesthouses dotted along the trail, there are old guys with mules offering a lift to the top and women selling fruit, water, chocolate and marijuana. The last of those grows in fields all over the gorge and is probably a pretty valuable cash crop. There are also little fields of corn anywhere they'll fit, and we saw occasional cattle and goats, pigs, geese, hens and (I don't know why) a monkey losing its mind in a small cage. It was not a good situation for the monkey and we were sad.

The second day was a pleasant, easy four hour stroll along a cliff edge. I'm looking at my photographs now and they don't even start to do it justice. It was so great :-) They've carved a little path into the cliff, maybe a couple of kilometres up, and you're walking along with a perfect clear view of the mountains from base to peak, tiny dots of other hikers on the path in the distance. It's absolutely stunning. From time to time you have to argue with mountain goats about who's going to pass on the outside, but other than that, the path is wide enough that it's never scary, just exciting. I mean, you could definitely die if you wanted to -- if you were looking at the trail through a camera, or walking along reading text messages on your phone, you would, no question about it, walk off the edge -- but so long as you pay attention, it's really not dangerous at all.

That said, I did start the first day by hilariously walking into a drainage ditch as I left the hostel and cutting open my shin. I'm calling this good luck: (a) it's useful to get a lesson about watching your feet when you're about to walk along a gorge, and (b) if I'm really lucky it'll scar and I can be vague about how I got my impressive Tiger Leaping Gorge injury.

Here are my pictures of Tiger Leaping Gorge. They are, to be honest, not as good as other pictures you'll find of Tiger Leaping Gorge, but these ones have me in them :-> http://whereistanya.smugmug.com/China/Tiger-Leaping-Gorge/