man Noah was such a star, he has an amazing ability to bring out the best in people and he is so funny, a really really nice guy - hopefully we will be meeting up with him and his girlfriend in India in November. We were both wishing that we had a few days to ourselves before our next tour started as it would have been nice to have a bit of time to recharge our batteries before meeting a new group of people but nar we were due to have our new group meeting at what we thought was 5 and we arrived at 3.30 so not much time! After a lovely hot power shower such a good feeling to wash away all that grime and sand, we went down for our meeting and after about 15 minutes into it we realised that this tour was off to Hong Kong not Tibet, and our meeting was at 6, arh a bit more chillin time!!!

Met up with everyone at 6, there’s 12 in the group, 4 English, 2 Australians and the rest Americans,

including the tour leader, kinda strange that there are so many Americans booking with an English ‘responsible travel’ company! We had arranged to meet up with our old group to have a final dinner together at a specialist Peking Duck restaurant, we were promised that they had a great veggie menu and such enough Noah wasn’t wrong. We met up with everyone in Tiananmen Square, wow what a square, it is enormous and a real treat to see it first at dusk, Noah bless him had bought some Rice Wine which we all had to sample - it’s horrid to be honest a sort of sherry like affair, thankfully we only had a mouthful each! It was quite hard to believe we were actually stood freely drinking rice wine in Tiananmen Square alls I could think off was remembering seeing those pictures on telly of that tank running over a student demonstrator and now I was actually stood in that very same square - bonkers! The next minute we were off in search of our restaurant and took our life into our hands crossing the massively wide