By now our readers will appreciate that we have written this travelogue in January 2011, some four years after our trip to "The Distant Chinas". The reason we have finally compiled this journey as a travelogue is because Alan and I had long realised that this was such a wonderfully interesting journey that our experiences may be appreciated and/or useful for other travellers contemplating travel to these exotic and far away locations.

In writing this travelogue we realised that our travels could be divided into two separate trips:

1. Yunnan Province and Tibet
2. The High Train "Lhasa Express", central and far west China

Both complement each other very well and subject to time limitations the two trips can be easily linked together, just as we did.

Since returning we have been interested to note that some packaged commercial tours labelled "Silk Road China" do not include the wonderful cities of Urumqi and Kashgar, and certainly not the friendly little Tajik township of Tashkorgan. We would certainly recommend their inclusion in any Silk Road travels.

We thoroughly enjoyed travelling by public bus or by car. These modes of transport, especially by bus, gave us a valuable opportunity to meet local people as well as providing a great way of viewing the townships, villages and countryside we were travelling through. Our disappointing experience on the train trip from Urumqi to Kashgar was very unfortunate and under better circumstances the viewing of the scenery on this trip should have been simply fantastic. And some of our train trips, including the high railway from Lhasa to Golmud were fabulous.

It is not especially difficult to travel around China on your own, but for us with no knowledge of the local language, it was essential to have an agent (s) to assist with necessary permits as well as transport and accommodation. And of course with guides in Tibet where travellers are required to be part of a tour - even if the "tour" consists of just two persons.

We returned to far west China in 2009. Once again we based ourselves in Urumqi but this time we travelled also to Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan. It was another journey of a lifetime. It is written up in Travelpod as "Painted Faces of the Silk Road".

You can see we have fallen in love with this region. We are exploring more of the western Silk Road Routes of Turkmenistan, Iran and also Pakistan this year. We will again use Urumqi as a base and we are returning from Pakistan to western China through Tashkorgan and back to Kashgar. Our final leg of this journey will be to explore the southern Silk Road route from Kashgar to Khotan and Niya, then through the Cross (Taklamakan) Desert Highway to Korla and back to Urumqi. Again we will use the services of China Travel Service, Australia as well as the excellent travel agents we used for our travels in 2009 (North Pakistan Tours, Treks and Expeditions, Pakistan; Advantour (Owadan), Turkmenistan; and Silk Road Adventures, far western China). We will be using the travel company Paritour for our Iran travels.

Finally, we would highly recommend our readers to write up their travels as a travelogue, perhaps not four years later though.... We have gained a great deal of pleasure in recalling, re-living and writing up our travels. Travelpod is a fabulous travel blog site, easy to use and the help facilities are excellent. Publishing our travels as a bound book has also been a great means of storing these memories in hard copy.

Happy travelling and happy writing!