What a girl will do for a steaming Chinese bun...

We are now back in China. I went from being too hot to sleep on Tuesday night to now being so cold again I can hardly speak! We have come north, and are near the mountains and I sit here in my thermals, my jeans, my hiking boots, my woolly hat and my waterproof. There has just been a huge thunder storm and this internet bar has no front door. Why, when for half the year the place is so cold do the restaurants and public places here have no doors? It is soooooo cold. And the hot water in our hotel only came on this afternoon.

Such a shame as we are really glad to be back in China - we just want it to heat up a bit. Being back with Chinese food is fab. Today we had snacks of steamed dumplings filled with sausage roll mixture and then we had a steamed cakey thing off a street vendor that was exactly like a treacle sponge - with hot treacle and everything!

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Musn't worry about the calories.. I probably need them to survive in these sub-zero temperatures.

So, we didn't stay long in Laos. From Luang Prabang (which I adored) we headed to Vang Viang - feted as a backpacker heaven and home to the infamous tubing down the river where you hire an inflated tractor inner tube, float down the river on it and at various intervals get pulled into one of the several riverside bars for a Beer Lao. When we arrived Pete was still poorly so we hung around in one of the bars with "beds" in where you lay watching Friends all day. Then the next day the heavens opened. To be honest, we just weren't digging the place. It was full of kids straight out of uni and didn't really have any charm (although the scenery around it was beautiful). We had a pie in an English pub and decided to hot-foot it to Vientiane - what has to be the smallest, quietest capital city on the planet. It was so hot some nights I couldn't sleep. We met up with our Dutch friends Kim and Ewoud again before they headed across the river into Thailand. We ate pain au chocolat and steak-frites and then tried to decide whether to head to Vietnam, Thailand or straight back to China. If the Bangkok-Kunming flight had been cheaper, I would have gone with Pete's desire to see some more warmth in Thailand before heading back to China. If the railway between Hekou on the China-Vietnam border was back up and running we would have headed to Hanoi just beacause we could. But the cheapest and most bus-free option was to fly straight to Kunming and then get a bus up here to Dali, which is exactly what we did. No more baguettes here. We're back into steamed dumplings of joy, lots of hot jasmine tea and freezing our bums off waiting in vain for the shower to heat up in our hotel room.

Ah, but it's good to be back! Hmmm, wonder what's for dinner...