One of the best things about China was the food. At home, neither of us are very big fans of Chinese restaurants, so we were both surprised at the amazing food that we were served at even the tiniest local restaurants where we couldn't understand a word of the menu and had to rely on the staff to choose our food. The best, and also the spiciest, food was in Sichuan province, especially the all you can eat hotpot restaurants, where you pick food from a buffet then cook it in a pot with oil, water, chilli and spices at your own table.
We arrived in China just in time to see the total solar eclipse on 22nd July, which was the longest eclipse of the 21st Century. The day was quite cloudy, but despite this we could see the sun through the clouds as the eclipse progressed, and the clouds shifted giving us a clear view of the 'diamond ring' just before totality. After the eclipse, we went down to the banks of the Qiantang River in time to see the tidal bore, a giant wave that rushes up the river mouth when the tide comes in.
We were pretty underwhelmed by Shanghai; the famous 'Bund' has been turned into a building site as they prepare for the 'Expo 2010'. The most exciting part for us was travelling to the airport on the superfast Maglev train at 300kph and watching the cars on the parallel motorway appear to drive backwards, although we were a bit pissed off that we missed out on taking the 420kph train by 10 minutes.
For Graeme's birthday we were in Chengdu and we went on a daytrip to the Panda Research Centre where we saw cute baby pandas including a nine day old one in an incubator. In the evening we went to the Sichuan Opera and saw traditional performances of fire-breathing and mask-changing.
Our last stop before leaving for Tibet was Leshan, where we fought through the throngs of Chinese tourists to see the world's largest sitting Buddha statue.
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