No matter how unconcerned you may be with your appearance, there comes a time in every traveler's life when the need to attend to personal maintenance asserts itself. It was hair-cut time again.

I have, of course, had my hair cut a few times on this trip and it has always been a relatively pleasant experience, combined as it variously has been with head massage, shoulder massage, shave, manicure etc. You certainly get more hair-cut for your money on the road than you do in the UK. No great surprise there I guess.

Obtaining said service in India or the middle east is a relative doddle. They are used to European tourists and in general have a good smattering of English. They also have similar styles, so there are no great surprises and you generally get what you are looking for. China is a very different story, however, and as I was to discover negotiating the various pit-falls of hair maintenance in this region is nothing short of a mine-field.

For a start, there are a bewildering number of hair salons in China. Every street houses 10's of them; enough, it would seem, to cut ther nation's collective hair twice a day continuously even given that China plays host to a quarter of the worlds population. Selecting an appropriate establishment is the first hurdle. This is made doubly difficult because, unlike the good old barbers back home, hair salons in China often double as brothels which goes a long way to explaining their frequency (apparently over 90% of Chinese business men use prostitutes on a regular basis). It is not unusual to see girls on display in the windows of said establishments, and this gives you a fair indication that a quick trim is not all that is on offer. Something for the weekend sir? However, whilst ''cut and blow-job'' one-stop shopping may sound appealing, the patrons in these establishments charge way more for the value-added services than they do for the hair-cut and so are not particularly interested in the latter. The chances are that if all you actually want is a hair-cut you are going to get pretty shabby service in these places.

A good (although not fool-proof) indication of a legitimate hair salon is that there are guys in there cutting hair. And so, with a certain degree of care, we (Steve and I) selected what looked like the Chinese equivalent of Toni and Guy, said a quick prayer to the god of good-hair-days and stepped, not for the first time, resolutely into uncharted territory..

It started well. Although the patrons spoke not a single word of English, we managed, as we have on so many occasions, to communicate our desires using sign language and we were duly whisked off for the obligatory hair-wash-with-integral-head-massage. So it was, suitably relaxed, we were wheeled out to sit in front of a mirror and await the main performance.

I should have realised that things were about to go pear shaped when I glanced in the mirror to see what closely resembled the Chinese tooth fairy floating towards me, scissors in hand, tin-foil sticking out of designer hair, and a look of spaced-out disconnection on his face that can only really be achieved by the artistically gay. I had, it seemed, entered the domain of Vidal Sassoon and been lucky enough to have secured the services of the head stylist. Overriding my immediate instinct to run screaming from the shop and not stop until I found a local yak shearer, I strapped myself in and attempted to explain, again in sign-language, that I wanted a short back and sides with half an inch off the top. He seemed to understand, and set to work with a flair and an apparent skill matched only by Eduard Scissor Hands. No turning back now.

So it was that over the next 45 minutes I watched with mounting horror as my hair was clipped, trimmed, thinned, scrunched and twisted into something that would not have looked out of place as a centre piece on a wedding cake. Then, suddenly and quite unexpectedly my limp-wristed abuser performed a flamboyant flourish that I took to mean he believed he had finished. Guess again Viv!

Whilst looking agog at the meringue on my head, I rapidly contemplated how I was now going to explain, through the medium of sign, that unlike David Beckham I did not have half an hour to spend designing my hair every morning and that, anyway, spending hours at a time on an open sided truck would likely ruin any artistic creation not stuck firmly down with super-glue. It wasn't going to happen. Instead I grabbed the brush off the guy, brushed my hair straight back - more or less simulating the effect the truck has - and the result spoke for itself. Hair of various lengths sticking out in all directions creating an effect not dissimilar to an exploding hedgehog. He wasn't impressed. This state of affairs degenerated further as I motioned with a chopping action what I wanted him to do. You would think from the expression on the guy's face that I had just asked him to spray-paint The Monalisa. He acquiesced, however, and proceeded to provide me with something approximating to a normal hair-cut crossed with a mohican.

And so it was that I came out of the hair-salon mildly traumatised and looking like the newest recruit to the Hitler Youth. The moral of the story: don't get your hair cut in China by anyone with tin foil in their hair!

This is panda country. Which if you are involved in the tourist industry in Chengdu, is probably just as well because other than this and a few less-than-notable temples there is little else to see here.

Aside from them featuring on the emblem of the World Wildlife Federation, which presumably means they are high on the endangered species list, and some vaguely remembered new footage of the keepers at London Zoo tearing their hair out trying to get a couple of apparently libidoless individuals to strike up a romance, I knew little about pandas before coming on this trip. I know a little more now.

The panda reserve in Chengdu is not going to make you an expert, but it will give you a surprisingly comprehensive appreciation of this creature. Depending on timing a visit here will give you the opportunity to see pandas in all stages of development, from newly born cubs in the incubator labs to mature adults that apparently to spend all their time reclining in their air-conditioned pens chewing on bamboo shoots. And in this heat who can blame them. The highlight of the show is the adolescents, though. If you are lucky enough to be there during the short intervals when they are let out of their pens you will be gifted with a rough-and-tumble display of circus-clown antics that are sure to leave you with aching sides.

It is true that pandas do not help themselves. A life-style that is effectively devoid of natural predators has rendered the panda somewhat lethargic. They typically inhabit the high mountains of central China (above about 1800m) where they spend the majority of their time munching through the monumental quantities of virtually nutritionally valueless bamboo shoots required to maintain their sloth-like existences. They are solitary creatures that rarely come into contact with others of their own kind. Even when they do encounter other individuals the females are stand-offish to such an extent that they would not be out of place in a London pub. Mating, as a consequence, is something of a rarity, and even when successful mating does occur, the pregnancy will usually result in just a single cub. These facts, presumably combined with habitat reduction and hunting, have reduced panda numbers to the extent that the species has trouble propagating itself. There are apparently just 1500 individuals left in the wild and no more than 300 in captivity. They are, in short, on the fast-track to extinction.

This is where the panda reserve in Chengdu comes in. As well as providing a means for the public to experience these creatures they also run a successful breeding programme, utilising AI where necessary, and as part of the visit it is possible to watch a 30 minute very informative video about this.

In the end a visit here will leave you with a better understanding of the plight of the giant panda, a warm spot in your heart for this charismatic creature, and a few more laughs to add to your collection. Well worth the trip.

Leaving Beijing we retraced our steps to Xian (once gain on the sleeper train which was mercifully devoid of snorers this time) to pick up the truck and allow the new arrivals time to visit the terracotta warriors. Not wishing to visit the warriors again (they are not great conversationalists) I spent a happy couple of days chilling (and eating McDonalds) after which we departed for Chengdu.

There is no doubt that this is a beautiful part of China and as you travel further south the terrain becomes more mountainous and more beautiful. This was the wet season, however, and the beautiful landscape was often muted by flat grey skies. Under such oppressive heavens this landscape can feel like a trap. One would think that having lived in Wales for 8 years I would be used to this, but after the wide open spaces and clear blue skies of Tibet this was a stark and claustrophobic change that at times became almost unbearable.

It is a fair way from Xian to Chengdu and so we had two nights rough camping. Camping in high humidity has, over the course of this trip, become one of my pet hates, and so I was not particularly looking forward to the camping on this leg of the journey. My fears were not unfounded. The next two nights were very hot and very sticky and made all the more interesting by the difficulty of locating campsites in a landscape that is wall-to-wall agriculture. So it was that after three days of driving through beautiful but oppressive landscape, some spectacular nightly thunder storms and at least one instance of chasing down runaway tents we arrived once again hot, dirty and smelly in Chengdu.

Bring on the air-con!

That there are 9 million bicycles in Beijing is a 'fact' for which I cannot vouch with anything like the certainty of 'our Katie'. However, there are a damned lot. It is not all that surprising, given that there are something like 18 million Chinese living here and that Beijing itself is approximately the same size as Belgium. If they all drove everywhere this place would very quickly become the automotive equivalent of fly-paper and the atmosphere, already bordering on intolerable, would be almost as impenetrable as the Great Wall.

There is a lot to see in Beijing and one could easily spend weeks exploring it. You would not, after all, expect to do justice to Belgium in a long weekend. Highlights are of course Tiananmen Square (including Mao's tomb), the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace and the Great Wall. Other than that there are a lot of bars and restaurants here that are well worth a look, a really nice souvenir market, the Beijing opera for he cultured (I skipped it) and the acrobatics shows which are completely mind-blowing and an absolute must-see.

The Chinese were kind enough to build Tiananmen square and the Forbidden City next to one another and so we naturally visited these together. Aside from the sheer size of the Forbidden City (a long morning allowed us to cover at most 30% of it), I found it monumentally underwhelming. This was partly down to the heat, partly to the aftermath of the (no)sleeper train and was perhaps not helped by most of the key buildings being shrouded in scaffolding. Reconstructions are very much in progress. However, for museum buffs it has a lot to offer and the amusement factor of positively the worst audio tour I have ever encountered anywhere was worth the giggle, if not the 100 Yuan. Tiananmen square is a very different story. Other than the huge monument to Mao containing his corpse in state which you can queue to see if you are willing to wait (it was closed when we got there), Tiananmen square is little but a very big expanse of concrete. However the recent history of this place makes a visit here poignant somehow and as such well worth a wander. We more-or-less circumnavigated the square (a fair walk) taking in lunch along the way. The Summer Palace is a much nicer experience than the Forbidden City and it is very easy to kill a day here walking around the beautiful lakes and appreciating the architecture of the lake-side temples and palace buildings. We were lucky enough to be there while they were staging a music and dance display.

The highlight of Beijing, though, was very definitely the Great Wall. A five hour drive from Beijing takes you to a point where you can walk a remote 10km section. This is well worth the extra investment of time against the alternative of the standard Beijing tourist area. It is, as I understand it, rare to experience the wall in clear weather. It is usually, at the very least, misty (a common theme in China) and if you are unlucky expect to be rained on. This in no way detracts, however, providing a wholly atmospheric experience with the wall and the beautiful scenery upon which it stands emerging from and disappearing into the murky distance in front and behind you. The walk itself is a relatively easy jaunt but has some short, steep and in some cases treacherous climbs and decents along the way. The humidity makes it harder, though, (at least for me) and I finished the walk ringing wet through with sweat which is less than pleasant.

All in all despite the debilitating humidity Beijing was a great experience. Here, though, we lose two of our fellow travellers (Liz and Denice), v-sad. Joe and Naomi join us, though, so we still have a full complement for the last leg of the trip. SE Asia and Bangkok here we come...