Revival!

Hello everyone! Its been a while.. Sarah and I have decided to kick start this beast back into operation as we are heading deeper into the darkness and internet is becoming more difficult to find! Instead of the luxury of emails we are going to try and write more here so you guys can keep track of what we are up if we can't email you all!
After A LOT of deliberation on what we were to do next and problems with visas and my new passport everything has fitted into place nicely and we are back in Southern China. Because the British Embassy managed to make my new passport quicker than the two weeks stated (for the unreal price of 160 pounds - looks like ferrero rocher all round at the embassy) we were able to make it back into China in time, just one day before the re-entrance date on our visa expired. This was a good thing as despite Chinas 'One world, one dream' mantra it is now very difficult for foreigners to obtain a Chinese visa.
We crossed the 'friendship pass' boarder crossing North East of Hanoi and caught a bus to Nanning, the capitol of Guangxi province. Fortunately we were able to get a night train that same evening out of Nanning as, despite its population of 1.5 million there was nothing interesting to keep us interested and the city was just another modern characterless Chinese city (this sounds bad but really its true... more about this soon).
The transition from Hanoi to Kunming has taken us from one kind of dampness to another.. Seven in the morning in Hanoi had us both profusely dripping in sweat unable to dry all day, and Kunming has RAINED non stop for the past three days! Its not even tropical rain, its cold wet drizzly grey rain just like in England! The coldness comes from the altitude - 1890 meters and the wet because its the wet season from now until the end of August! Our arrival in Kunming was a bit of a shock as it had been raining heavily all night and most of the city was under at least a foot of water! To get to our hostel we had to wade through the floodwaters, sewage and various floaters.. nice!
Kunming is yet another Chinese city, this one is the capitol of Yunnan province with a population of 1.2 million. Chinese cities may sound exotic and interesting to the uninitiated but really they are not, the main characteristics are... large featureless glass buildings, huge amounts of construction building more large featureless glass buildings, destruction of anything remotely old or holding character to make way for more large featureless glass buildings, huge amounts of traffic and car fume pollution and shopping malls so vast and filled with luxury goods you could mistake yourself for being in Dubai. Anyway, we have been using Kunming as a base to see some surrounding sights and to prepare ourselves for journeys into more remote parts of Yunnan.
Yunnan is the sixth largest province in China and more interestingly for us is only 50% Han Chinese, the remaining 50% is made up of various ethnic groups who have resisted Han influence and still hold strong local identities. Due to the regions remoteness and ruff rugged terrain its always been a bit of a renigade and has had a history of breaking ties with Beijing.
On a map you will find us just north of Laos and North East of Burma! The scenery here is varied, from thick tropical jungle down in the south (near Burma) to huge mountains in the north (near to Tibet and Sichuan).
We are hoping to travel North East from where we are now towards the mountains of Sichuan and Tibet through various villages and ethnic groups. There are Tibetan areas of Yunnan and Sichuan we are going to try and visit but the word on the street is that they may still be off-limits... We would like to take the 8 day mountain road into Lhasa (capitol of Tibet) from here but its a complete no-no for the Chinese Police, we would be turned back as soon as we leave Sangraii-La. Even though China says Tibet is open to foreign travelers its actually very difficult to enter... the rules are you can only enter via the train or plane or bus from the northern route, you have to be a member of a tour consisting of a group of people all traveling on the same passport type (ie uk), all hotels and tickets must be booked in advance and thats the only place you can stay all through an agency in advance, no visiting a list of monasteries provided by the government (generally the big ones), no traveling outside of Lhasa unless arranged by the same company the original tour was booked through and only after 12 days prior notification by the Tibetan tourist authority (Chinese). All in all its a stupid process that would cost us a fortune in time and money and has only made us more critical of the Chinese handling of the whole situation!
Anyhow, if a journey towards Tibet is not possible we are planning to taking the road North East over the Sichuan mountains towards Chengdu. Not sure of our exact route yet but it will have to take us out west way as in five weeks we will need to be entering Pakistan!

On a different note we have just been reading that the UN has declared this year the year of the potato! With rising costs in rice and failures in wheat harvests they have decided that spuds are the way ahead.... this article has also given a list of the average consumption, in grammes per person per day of various countries in the world, the average being 104 grammes per person per day. China comes out slightly over average at 110 g/p/d, USA 150 g/p/d... us brits doubles that at 310 g/p/d. staggeringly the people in Belarus on average eat 950 grammes per person per day! Thats 50g short of a Kilo each of potatoes EVERY DAY! We found this funny!

Anyway, watch this space for forthcoming updates on our views and stories on traveling in China!