The alarm went off at 6:30am.....

How happy was I went I realised that we had no idea where the west bus station was. Off went the alarm and back to sleep went I! Sometimes having no idea about things really is a good thing. The caves had been around for hundreds of years and I'm sure they were not going anywhere too soon.

We decided to spend the day doing what I had missed doing. Simply WALKING and WALKING and WALKING for hours. Take any alley or lane way that looks interesting and see where and to what it leads. Feast your peekers on a building far off into the distance and walk towards it. It really doesn't matter if you get lost as really your not lost as you never knew were you were in the first place.

So you are temporarily misplaced or delayed....not lost!

Behind the shop fronts in our area we found a heap of back lanes filled with market stalls. Here you could by so many types of breads and noodles but not a single grain of rice. We finally found the main street again and continued walking stopping to check anything and everything out. Finally we found a map not long after we passed a huge white Mosque just after an overpass. The newspaper man help us locate where we were and now that we were found we could have fun getting lost. Like usual on any map in Chinese you have to change some of the main street names in to Pinyin and add a few KFC's and western markers and wallah, you have direction. We zig zagged here and zag zigged there and made our way all the way to the train station on the other side of town.

What does Shane do then?

To Judy's disgust, he walks back in another direction!

We once again zig zagged our way through the streets this time in a western direction. We stopped in at a pleasant family eatery and ate the best pork ribs since arriving in China. We then dropped in at a camping shop where I got myself my first compass which also has the temperature on the other side, for the big price of two Aussie Dollars.

Now I'm sure to get lost!

The sun set, the moon was out and we could even see the stars. Not a bad part of China I thought! Near our overpass we found a little beer garden thingy out the front of a hotel. There we sat drinking cold beers by star light.

Not a bad part of China indeed!

Lanzhou is a great city, in fact it would be my favorite city visited these holidays. You have everything you need (besides an endless supply of rice!). Transport takes you everywhere, it is a hub between the very west and the east sides of China. You have Han Chinese, Tibetans, Muslims and the girls surprise to me are very beautiful indeed. I was a tad worried they would be more Tibetan looking...not that there is anything wrong with that!

Breads and Noodles to you....shane