We're back! We have now been stumbling around mainland China for just over 3 weeks, in a somewhat exasperating fashion thanks firstly to the incomprehensibility of Mandarin Chinese, and also to a few other soon to be explained cultural differences.

Before getting onto that, I mustn't forget that we spent time first in Los Angeles and then Hong Kong before we got here. And boy was LA a change of scene from South America, though perhaps less so coming from cosmopolitan Buenos Aires than it would have been coming straight from somewhere like Bolivia. We LOVED it.

Imagine two shabbily dressed, out of shape backpackers desperately seeking out Starbucks, choffing huge quantities of salad, fruit and iced tap water (well, one of us anyway. Read burgers, fries and beer for the other) and merrily running around shopping malls salivating at the choice, quality and downright magnificent shopping (or mostly browsing in our case) experience, and you are imagining us.

We enjoyed ourselves immensely, and were extremely thankful to be able to stay 3 blocks from Manhattan Beach (think Baywatch without the 34DD-24-34 lifeguards) thanks to my cousin & her husband's hospitality. We didn't quite fit into the LA beach 'burb scene of course - no rollerblading in bikini top with perfect midriff, no fake boobs, no long blonde hair, no perfect nails, no perfect tans, no jogging together with baby in tow in a funky tricycle pram, and no surfboards - but we didn't care. We definitely did not want to leave, but, reluctantly, we did.

Hong Kong was like sensual assault after LA. Hot, sticky, noisy, edgy and humming with all types of commerce, from street vendors to gleaming corporate high-rises. Our hotel also had to be seen to be believed. A tiny box high in an ancient & filthy 'mansion block', with a bathroom so small the shower head was directly over the toilet. The only good thing about it was air conditioning. In fact, I have to admit, we are now addicted to aircon. We have to stop ourselves from planning our itinerary around it, it's that bad.

I was a bit surprised not to see any noticeable difference in Hong Kong from when I was there 10 years ago, before the handover. If anything, there seemed to be more signs of healthy capitalism than before, from eye poppingly high skyscrapers, massive construction and, more unexpectedly, a ridiculous number of luxury shopping malls. I have never been anywhere else with at least 10 each of proper sized Gucci, Fendi, Prada and countless other designer stores, and that's just the ones we spotted. It was unreal. One mall boasted 700 shops. I expected tiny stalls, but these were just like shops in malls anywhere in the western world - the place was the size of a small country! Shame we couldn't make use of them, except to feed the aircon habit. Street vendors selling fake bags did good business out of us (me) instead.

Hong Kong definitely eased us gently into Asia. We dined on Starbucks, Pret a Manger (!) and Delifrance pastries while wandering around the equivalent to the City watching folks like us hurrying around in sweaty suits and ties (sorry guys) as we leisurely strolled around in tourist mode. But we also came up against the language barrier and unusual food experiences that we thought we'd find more of on the mainland, and hindsight proves us right. We spent 3 sweaty days taking in the sites and getting our mainland visas sorted. A highlight was seeing the Big Buddha statue they built on a hill on Lantau Island in the 1980s. Very impressive he was too, even though we expected him to be a little more ancient than Spandau Ballet.

From Hong Kong, we have headed north and west through China aiming to end up in Beijing shortly. Along the way we stopped first at Guangzhou, the first big city across the border with HK, then to Guilin/Yangshuo to take in the stunning so-called 'karst' scenery there. From Yangshuo we took a couple of trains to get to Chengdu in Sichuan province, bordering with Tibet (via the dullest city we've ever been to, Guiyang).

In Chengdu we said hello to some giant pandas, took in a local (earsplitting) opera and used it as a base to explore Sichuan. We first went south to climb a sacred Buddhist mountain, Emei Shan, then north to a little town called Songpan for 2 days horse trekking in the mountains and north again for 3 days in Jiuzhaigou, a national park with stunning coloured lakes in an area more Tibetan than Chinese.

From back in Chengdu we headed north-east to Xi'an by train 2 days ago to check out the terracotta warriors (today), and tomorrow we go on to explore Beijing and the Great Wall. After that I think we'll throw the towel in and head off to SE Asia which we'd like to be a little less hard work than here, fascinating and unmissable as it has been. I take my hat off to any one who travels independently here for months on end - it's better than work obviously, but we have had to try harder to find it rewarding compared to S. America. Maybe we’re just not intrepid enough 

I think 'things we didnt' expect' is the best way to highlight the highs and lows of China:

• To see an adult giant panda splash its legs about in a paddling pool just like a little kid would (he was trying to cool down after a play fight with his mate. We later heard he'd had to be put back indoors cos he'd started a real fight with him!)

• To sweat our way to the top of a 3000m mountain accompanied by high heeled, pop sock-wearing local tourists, with snack vendors every 100m or so and monks with mobile phones! We reckon there were more than 50,000 steps on the mountain in total, and that we climbed a good percentage of them, all in sauna-like heat. Nice. Not sure the monks in the monastery we stayed at overnight up there thought so, although we can't have smelt worse than their toilets.

• To spend 12 hours on a bus showing video karaoke the whole way, with passengers singing along at full blast. You gotta love it. Thankfully the trains are much quieter and generally they are a blessed relief after all our painful bus trips in S.A.

• To find another country on a par with Argentina as obsessive tea drinkers. Come to mention it, this place is also on a par with S. America more generally in terms of crazy driving and use of car horns. Travel the world, come to believe Paris is full of grannies driving as sanely as possible…

• Toddlers to wear clothes with open seams around the bottom / crotch (they don't use nappies...). when the time comes, mum simply holds little benny over the roadside or wherever

• To see umbrellas permanently fixed to bikes, not to mention cyclists causing mayhem everywhere. Traffic rules don't appear to exist in any recognizable form. At one point in China's history, Chairman Mao ordered traffic to go on red rather than green, causing massive confusion (surprise). I'm not sure they've ever got back to normal.

• To see tractors and bicycles carefully balancing unbelievable loads; of cardboard, plants, distilled water containers, plants, chickens... you name it, they carry it. We even spent some time in a traffic jam staring through the bus windscreen at a truck laden with bloody yak bones - a row of skulls at the back and rib cages piled high around the sides

• To see most of the country through a haze of mist, town and country. We think it's a mixture of mist and pollution, mostly the latter.

• To have lunch cooked for us by a local guide in her home in moon Hill village near Yangshuo (and no, it didn't meet Lonely Planet careful eating/drinking requirements surprisingly enough - tasted good though). We spent a fab day cycling around lush rice paddies with her, taking in the postcard-like scenes of stunning limestone peaks (each no more than 200m high and 100m round), tiny villages, peasants tending to their fields and water buffalo submerged in every bit of water they could find.

• To eat dinner (twice) with 4 or 5 tibetan monks in their monastery in Juizhaigou national park, trying yak butter tea (ew) and tibetan beer (barleywine, much better than the tea), avoiding the dish of stir fried pork fat (god knows what this country does with all its lean meat) and coping with sitting on foot-high stools. We were doing well until one monk took his shoes off. That even beat the yak butter tea...

• To see every tiny village with huge white satellite dishes on every house. modern technology has definitely arrived in China. Everyone has a cellphone proudly strapped to their belt, every house has tv, internet cafes are everywhere.

• To see a tv channel which only has presenters from the Chinese army

• The sheer number of people. It's hard to picture 1.3 billion people, but visiting a Chinese city or tourist attraction gives you some idea. There are people EVERYwhere. Solitude is definitely not something you seek in China.

• So little ethnic diversity. 95% of locals are Han Chinese, which basically means that except in the minority pockets of Tibet etc., 99.9% of everyone you see had the same facial features, hair & skin colour. Although saying that, 5% of 1.3 billion still adds up to more people than the population of the UK, which puts it into perspective.

• The contrasts between old and modern China. Guangzhou was a good example. On leaving the tiny, idyllic island of colonial buildings and elderly people gracefully doing tai-chi where we were staying, we hit the noisy, polluted, hectic city centre. We first wandered through reasonably quiet, narrow, grubby backstreets filled with unbelievable numbers of tiny shops selling identical things, ranging from dried goods to live animals (we saw scorpions, shell-less turtles (how cruel is that), puppies, kittens, fish - I'd like to think they were for pets...) to - bizarrely - haberdashery and jade jewellery. We then turned a corner and immediately hit a wide, paved street teeming with young people jabbering excitedly, lined with western-style clothes shops blaring out top volume pop music, shop assistants clapping and shouting at passers by to get them in. Welcome to the contrasts of China.

• To come to such a good understanding of the phrase 'culture shock'. Some differences are definitely easier to cope with than others. A few chinese habits have tested us a tad, but no doubt they're preparing us for the rest of Asia. A few of the worst have been the incessant smoking (it's clearly important to smoke as much as possible in enclosed public spaces in particular), hawking up phlegm and spitting everywhere - men and women, eating habits that would have your mum sending you to your room in seconds, the way a normal conversation sounds like the worst row you ever heard (until they laugh together or hug or something), unbelievable pushing & shoving (no English queuing to be seen), the toilets (and I thought I'd seen it all. Public toilets don't even have cubicles here, just hip-height walls separating tiny areas with a channel running through them all. Put a 6 foot white woman’s butt poking out the top of one of those and you’ve got an instant circus)

• The staring. In S. America, the kids stared, but the adults weren't at all interested (at least openly), unless they were in the tourist business. Here, westerners are still such a novelty in most places that EVERYONE stares! Open-mouthed, head-turning, traffic stopping sort of staring. One guy turned around, saw us and burst out laughing! We must have said hello to at least 50 people every day. It's the only word many people know. Of course it’s simple curiosity, but after 3 weeks of checking my face for spots, bogies or hair disasters, we sometimes have to bite our tongues when the nth person stands a foot away from you staring you up and down

• the food. These guys are amazing, they eat every part of so many animals (rat, lizard, snake, scorpion, bugs, dog, tiny birds), and I mean EVERY part. In a market today we saw pigs ears, tails, hooves, stomachs, cow stomach, chicken feet, flattened lizards splayed out on sticks, eels being skinned alive... in fact, I don't think we saw any normal cuts of meat at all! Another strange thing is that when you order meat, you get fat, often with hair on, which just isn't tasty (once we even got a boney chicken, first it had been chopped in half, than battered flat and served on the plate, yellow skinned and virtually meat less. It even had half its head with brain in tact!) Some dishes have been really good (I’m now obsessed with gongbao chicken) but mostly quite greasy unfortunately. We've also been surprised by how sweet most of the snack food is, especially the bread. How disappointing is that! On our horse trek, a lovely but somewhat grimy peasant guide served us raw tomatoes (washed in the stream) with sugar on for lunch. Another round in our series of games of russian roulette.

• the full on approach to tourism, almost entirely aimed at the enormous domestic market. Jiuzhaigou has to be the perfect example of this. There we were, excitedly suffering a 12 hour bus ride to reach a remote national park described as a 'gorgeous alpine valley filled with crystal clear coloured lakes', offering 'pristine hiking opportunities' for a few days recharging our batteries and finding some much-needed peace and quiet. The first clue to our misinformed optimism was finding the road as we neared the park entrance lined with at least 20 huge hotels. Then we saw the entrance. Oh My God. It was Disneyland! A massive shopping & ticket office complex next to rows of steel queueing barriers to get in, as well as a billboard sized LED screen flashing messages about environmental tourism. We estimated they have between 5 and 10,000 visitors a day. 99.9% of whom are local tourists who stay in the huge hotels, come in, get on a bus that drops them off at each of the lakes to have their photo taken in front of it (there are even people helpfully offering their dressed up yaks and traditional costumes to tourists to enhance the authenticity of their pictures...) and takes them out again. So this beautiful, serene-looking spot has a road right the way through it, constantly full of horn-beeping buses shipping the locals in and out. To top it all, they've built a 'wooden plank road' the entire 35km length of the park that you have to walk on. Hardly what we'd come for! Given the number of people though, it makes sense to protect the environment by forcing people to stick to a path and use the litter bins. What they forgot was that the locals don't actually seem to like walking too much, so apart from a couple of drunken path sweepers sleeping it off, we had the path virtually to ourselves.

That all said, we were very impressed with the Terracotta Warriors that we saw today. We'd been told they were disappointing so our expectations were very low, and we were pleasantly surprised to be quite awe-struck by them. Definitely worth a visit.

All in all, we're both glad we came to experience China as it is different to anywhere either of us have ever seen before. As always, visiting has also heightened our awareness and interest in the history, future and issues of the place. Given China's pace of change and growth, and its huge population, we will watch with interest to see how things play out. If anyone is interested in this aspect, we can thoroughly recommend a book called 'China Wakes' by N. Kristof and S. Wudunn. It certainly opened our eyes to things we would never understand as tourists here in a million years. Don't make our mistake of bringing it into the country when it expressly states on its visa forms that bringing defamatory literature in is illegal!