Our driver met us wiith his funky six seater micro mini bus at the agreed time of 8am to drive from Shangri La to Feilai Si. Obviously the Chinese tourist did a good job with the translation!!! Well, it turned out to be the best £50 we've ever spent, what a spectacular journey!! The driver was really cool, he knew all the best places to stop for photos and was happy to stop whenever we wanted and for however long - we ended up taking 200 photos!!! It was a bit drizzly when we first left Shangri La but after half an hour or so as we climbed slowly up the mountain the cloud started to lift and we ended up having the best day of weather we have seen since being in China, we were soooooooooooo lucky!!!! The vews were absolutely amazing, we must have driven through 8 or so different valleys and went over at least 4 mountain passes, three of which were over 5,000 metres. The scenery went from from mountains covered in pine forest to barren rocky peaks that ranged in colour from red to purple to grey and green, We had views of 6,000 metre plus ranges that were snow capped with glaciers hanging from the sides and drove down in the bottom of the valley alongside the Mekong River. Every time we switchbacked up a mountain and changed direction into another valley the scenery changed. We stop at Benzilan for lunch and Jay went into the kitchen with the cook and picked out, potato, tomato, egg, sweetcorn and morning glory. The food was great, we ended up with shredded potato that was fried into something like a massive crisp but juicier, scrambled egg with tomato and spring onion, sweetcorn with mixed peppers and morning glory with ginger, the best Chinese food we've tasted so far. After lunch we crossed another pass and then stopped at Dhondrupling Gompa which was set on the side of a mountain and was full of amazing paintings and a scene made of small figurines that depicted heaven and hell, some of it was quite savage but we had a good laugh with the driver!! You could tell that the road suffered a lot from landslides but we were lucky and didn't come across any problems, we were surprised as well at the lack of traffic on the road. We finally arrived at Feilai Si at 4.15pm and had about 80% view of the Meili Xeushshan range with the Mingyong Glacier and peak of Kawa Karpo in view which you could view from across the road from our hostel. We did plan on trekking up the glacier the following day but the weather really turned to crap and we spent the morning walking around the village and the afternoon in bed reading!!!!!! That night the weather didn't improve so we decided to cut our losses and head back to Shangri La the following day - erm that was easier said than done, ha ha!!!! We spent the entire afternoon and evening with the Lonely Planet phrase book trying to arrange transport, it wasn't until the hostel owner tracked down another Chinese tourist who spoke English that we managed to sort it out!! The trip back was very different, we spent the first couple of hours actually in the cloud and didn't bother stopping for photos or lunch, we got back in less than 4 hours and practically sprinted to McConkeys for chicken burger and chips!! We spent one night in Shangri La and then headed the next day to Lijiang which we'll tell you about in the next blog :-)