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After an 8 hour bus journey through some lovely mountain scenery, huge rivers and gorges, we arrived in Shangri La a few days ago. We are now at an altitude of 3,550 metres so we're definately high enough to get altitude sickness but apart from Emma having a bit of a headache for the first day, we've both been fine. Shangri La is a nice place, in a nice setting surrounded by mountains (not snow covered though). It has an old town and new town - the old town has some original buildings but a lot of it is just buildings built in an old style. There is a temple here with the biggest prayer wheel in the world. 80% of the locals are Tibetan and on our first night here, we had yak hot pot for tea, it was very nice, we also had a yak cheese platter the other day which was so nice we bought half a kilo for when we go trekking. Every evening at 7pm the locals all gather in one of the town squares and dance til 9pm!! There was about 500 people at the one we watched tonight, old men and women, young girls and lads, business men still in their suits, the lot - they all do exactly the same dance in a massive circle. Emma has been really really ill the last couple of days, not sure what it was but it definately didn't agree with her stomach! Night before last she didn't sleep at all and spent the whole day in bed yesterday with bad stomach, muscle cramps and bone ache!!!! She feels better today but everything is still going through in about 10 minutes - woo hoo may lose some weight!!! We leave Shangri La tomorrow to head further north to a place called Deqin although we're actually going to be staying in a small villlage 10km away called Felai Si. The route is supposed to be spectacular so rather than fly through on the bus we've hired a car and driver so we can stop on route to take photos etc, its about 110 miles away so will take about 7 hours - we'll be going over 3 mountain passes 5,000 metres high (will probably spend the whole journey either with eyes closed or in the crash position)!!!! Oh our driver doesn't speak English (no one does around here, not even the manager of the hotels we're staying in!!!) while we were trying to negotiate a price with him and trying to explain where we wanted to go, a Chinese American who is on holiday here, came and translated for us so we got it sorted. We went to a pharmacist the other day to get some pain killers and it took half an hour and lots of hand signals to get some brufen! Still hate the food here but tonight we found a fake KFC/McDonalds called McConkeys and had a wicked spicy chicken burger, wings, pineapple pie and chips - woo hoo - probably not what the doctor ordered for Emma though still having a bad stomach but it had to be done, ha ha. Hopefully in the next blog we can let you know about all the amazing trekking we've done but given the weather forecast - rain, sprinkles and storms, we might just let you know how great our room was at the hostel!!!
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