Up early for an 8am leave and Linz has a cold shower, which I decided to skip. Then she goes to breakfast, on the roof, in the rain, which I also miss as my tummy is still playing up. Instead I spend time trying to make it look like I have had a shower when in fact I am a bit minging.

Oooh also, at breakfast Linz gets told that she was lying about having a cold shower, by one of the hotel staff.

We then get into the mini bus, our driver turned up again to collect us. I really like our driver. He is cool. He speaks one word of English ‘hello’, to match my ‘nie hao’, but he makes a real effort to communicate and be friendly. It makes a nice change from the tour guides. We call him ‘Drive’.

We quite quickly head out of Lijiang and up a steep mountain road. The weather is awful so the views are restricted. But it’s exciting to be heading even higher. Because of the rain it will take even longer to get to Shangri La, so we’re in for a long day in the m’bus.

We stop along the way to see the view, which was cloudy. But then we got to see the Yangtze river in full swell. Really big and really noisy.

Then we went towards the gorge and stopped for lunch. Really tasty lunch. A local unidentified vegetable with garlic, chicken and mushroom soup, egg and vegetables, and smoked pork with sugar snap peas. All delicious. And all for 45 yuan.

Before lunch we met our new tour guide, he looked nice. After lunch were jumped into the bus and drove to the leaping tiger gorge. The drive was stunning, and then we actually got there. It was phenomenal. So much water! The deepest gorge in the world, apparently.

Turns out our tour guide is actually really annoying. He doesn’t let us do what we want, but instead insists we do really weird stuff that he’s obviously on commission for. We went to a sword shop in the usual fashion. Linz and I got fed up and went and sat with Drive. He’s cool, we are bad at nicknames.

We’re then driven the remaining journey to Shangri La, a further 2000m of ascent. The Tibetan plateau is our destination although we’re staying within China.

The plateau is really brilliant. There were Yaks and pigs and people riding horses and the were two gathering things that were horse races we think. We would have loved to investigated but this awful tour guide wouldn’t let us. To dangerous. Pah!!!!

Weird. He also said it wasn’t on our itinerary, but then neither was that weird knife shop he took us to, claiming it was an ” cultural art” shop. Nor was the dancing for 20 quid that he said we had to go to, in some kind of cultural outreach manner!  We declined. He got angry. We laughed.

The final straw was that he wanted us to buy hiking gear and oxygen to go to the monastery tomorrow. We also declined. He said we had to have it in case something happened. What! Oxygen??? Did he think we were idiots??? Oxygen to go to a monastery……