The 6 of us who'd left Hong Kong together decided we'd spent enough money, so headed up to Zushi where Luke and Josh's project is. They'd headed up with Sam after Hong Kong as they'd all spent every last penny they had. The town had a much more traditional feel to it compared to the other projects i've been to, with lots of street food stalls, small 'garage' restaurants, market streets and few buildings more than two or three stories high. A 5 minute walk to the edge of the town leads into hills and what was a lake.

The 9 of us then spent the next 10 days together pretty much just sleeping, eating and playing drinking games.  Matt had made up his own Lord of the Rings themed drinking game, which was really good - it involved 9 cups in a ring with one in the middle which was getting filled with beer, wine and bijou, not the best mix. One of the evenings, after Matt deciding he wanted to play Monopoly, we decided to improve the dining table by stripping it back and carving the game into it. After all the effort it took, we started playing but soon got board, at least they have an interesting table now though. Before all splitting off back to our projects we had a banquet with just us, then Luke and Josh's school put on a banquet with their head teacher and a couple of others, which was really nice of them.

We tried to get across to see the pandas before heading back up, but we had a bit of trouble with the trains getting back up to Xinjiang, which meant we didn't get to see them. Hopefully i'll be able to squeeze them into summer traveling somewhere. We made it back to Lanzhou, but me, Sam, Rosie and Florrie still had to get back up to Xinjiang, the next problem. No trains and buses would let us buy their tickets and with no money to be able to fly back, we thought we were going to get stuck. Luckily after a few hours of station hopping around Lanzhou, we finally got tickets for a bus by showing them our residency permits and finally persuading them that we do actually live here. 24 hours on a bus wasn't actually that bad, it passed rather quickly sleeping the majority of the time, and when we were awake we had the Taklamakan Dessert to look at, or at least until we got bored of dried rocky mountains and flat nothingness.