Zhongwei, China, Asia

A 21 hour afternoon and overnight train, took us out of the capital city and into the Tengger Desert, Inner Mongolia. Sitting between large sand dunes and the Yellow River, this was a completely different world to Beijing.

We sampled the sights of the Yellow River by casually floating downstrean on sheep skin rafts, quite literally bamboo sticks attached to inflated sheep skins. Miraculously we managed to float the whole 2.5 hours without tipping the raft or sinking. The Yellow River is surrounded in sandstone mountains, giving the river its name - the water is supposed to look yellow, although I would say it just looks muddy!.

The next day we headed out into the desert, where we each got to know our individual camels very well, after they led us into the desert up and over numerous sand dunes. Some camels managed to throw their passengers off, mid climbing onto their backs, other camels managed to lose their footing equally resulting into a person landing on the sand. Luckily, Cam the Camel (Cam, this is purely a name thing, as Cam goes with Camel rather than suggesting that you look like a camel...) was as good as gold and survived the desert trek without injury.

We spent the night camping in the desert, watched the sunset over the dunes, toasted marshmellows on the fire and drank warm beer (not a highlight). The next morning we found a newly formed friends (the camels) and made our way back to civilisation to catch another overnight train to Xian.