Urumqi

Yay! I've been back at the nice hotel in my original room and they fixed the heating so I had a lovely night but in true Chinese style a couple of things were guaranteed not to work. One was the shower so I'm building up a nice layer of grime for the train to Kazakhstan tonight. The other was the bedside light switch so even though I was in the swishest hotel we've been in by a mile I still had to shuffle around after I'd turned the lights out with my miner's head torch on.

Today was a nice easy day, we went to buy our train tickets which was surprisingly painless, a quick shunt around the bookshop, stocked up at the supermarket, lunch and back to the hotel where we have kept one suite on for the day because we don't have to leave until 10 o'clock tonight. Everyone is sitting around typing emails and Facebook entries with coffee and doughnuts. Very civilised but I wish we'd thought to bring a couple of DVDs to watch.

I think this is the first time that I've had more than an hour or so to relax and catch up, last night I managed to upload a couple of hundred MB to Flickr, apologies for any repeat pics or just general repetitiveness but it' s been hard to keep on top of them all and there was an awful lot of sand out there.

I'm really looking forward to getting home now, I've had an amazing time but I'm feeling pretty whacked and now I can't wait to have a bath that doesn't have Chinese business men's hair in it and a cup of tea that doesn't have a jungle in it. Then I can smell Ed's belly before settling down to watch the episodes of 'Strictly' that I've recorded (I hope).

So I'm off now for a couple of days, I'm not sure there will be any interweb in Almaty so there's a good chance that this might be the last post for this trip. Happy Birthday to Michiko for Thursday, I'm back on Friday morning so if I'm fit enough I'll buy you a beer on Saturday if you're free. Love to you all, Byeeee.