June 14-17 - Songpan, Sichuan, China

The bus ride from Chengdu was one of the longest I've had to endure - 11 hours in the back of a hot bus on super-bumpy roads.  Yuck.  Songpan town isn't much to write home about but the 3 day horse trekking trip we arranged was good fun, if not very serious in terms of the riding done or distance covered.  The scenery enroute to "Ice Mountain" was of green river valleys and quaint farming villages and the mountainous area we reached at around 4300m was quite spectacular.  On the way back we checked out one of the larger Tibetan temples - this place was covered with inscribed stone tablets in the beautiful Tibetan script and surrounded by hundreds of metres of prayer wheels - these people are certainly devoted to their religion!  The horses performed well, carrying us and our gear over some pretty rough terrain (they're very impressive in their ability to power up steep hills at a sustained pace - powerful animals), but it was more a case of them simply carrying us and following the leader than us actually having to do any riding - zero skill required! (which was good because I've basically never ridden before).  We camped for 2 nights in decent tents and had all our food provided by our guides.  The food wasn't great - pretty bland and mostly veges and breads - but survivable.  The guides seemed to want to do less riding and more sitting round at camp, so our days weren't long, but this was more of a blessing than a curse because the wooden saddles these guys use aren't exactly comfortable!  In all it was a nice intro to horse trekking at a relaxed for-the-tourists pace, but a good experience in all.  Something a bit more hardcore would definitely be fun - perhaps in Mongolia some day?

Yum, tomatoes with sugar and bread for lunch...I gotta get to Europe for some proper food!