Our trip to Xiahe had been a small detour from the SIlk Road to get away from noisy towns and cities. Whilst it had been a good rest and I was tempted to go further south in CHina, we had to return to Lanzhou in order to head to my final desitnation on the SIlk ROad - Xi'an (Î÷°²£©since Lanzhou has proven pleasant enough, this wasn't too disappointing.

In typical CHinese style we turned up at the bus station having purchased our tickets for the 7.30am bus to Lanzhou only to find that actually there wasn't a bus at all! Instead we had to get on another bus and change at LInxia some 2 hours away. This was not a good way to start the morning.

HOwever the bus got to LInxia very quickly despite stopping at every village on the way to pick or drop off passengers. Passing through the villages did give me another interesting insight into Chinese rural life. In one of the villages I even had the pleasant sight of seeing 8 freshly slaughtered headless sheep lying on the dusty ground in a pool of blood while their severed heads lay nearby in a small pile. A butcher was already hacking his way through another sheep. The term hygenic obviously doesn't exist here.

The new bus at LInxia was a joke. It took us nearly an hour to actually leave the town as we went round and round the city inexplicably turning around and returning to where we'd just come from. I suppose at least we got a free sightseeing tour, but I was getting pretty annoyed by the time we actually did hit the open road.

We arrived in Lanzhou at lunchtime and set about doing our usual business here before heading to a bar for the evening.