It looks like De Lage Landen will be the winner of this leg of the race as they have a time advantage having stopped to help Gold Coast Australia. Qingdao will not be in the first arrivals but is likely to get a great reception when reaching her home port. A rest until March 4 when it all starts again.

The “Sky Train”, “Lhasa Express”, “Rocket to the rooftop of the world”, “World’s highest railway”; regardless of what its called, The Qinghai-Tibet train is truly an engineering wonder. Taking 47 hours to travel from Beijing to Lhasa the train crosses 675 bridges on a 4064km journey.

Some great pictures can be seen as well as maps of the route on http://www.tibettraintravel.com.

One of the most important Tibetan Buddhist ceremonies, held each year on the 13th day of the first lunar month takes place at the monastery of Labrang. The Thangka – a giant embroidered silk covered painting – is carried down the mountain by 100 lamas (monks) and unrolled for an hour in the sun. For beautiful pictures of this we recommend looking at http://goo.gl/YuOxj and yes there are people standing at the bottom.

China now has almost 10,000km of high speed rail track but on the last Friday of the New Year holiday 5.8 million pasenger trips were made needing an additional 672 trains. This holiday rush even has a name, 春运,chūn yùn. The high speed trains are clean, comfortable and modern. Seating is comparable to that in an airplane. Most tickets are for assigned seats; no-seat tickets are sometimes sold in limited numbers, but unlike regular Chinese trains, there is never a mad crush with more people sitting in the aisles than in seats.

This is our office dragon kite. The capital city of kite making in China is Weifang. This year’s kite festival in Weifang starts on April 20th. The history of kite making and its legends are an important part of Chinese culture. We will have lots more kite blogs during the year. If you have the chance buy a kite in a market in Beijing. Some really good long kite pictures at http://www.airdynamics.co.uk/dragon_xxl.html or look in Google images for “Weifang kites”

As well as dumplings and fish and nián gāo, 年糕, – made of sticky rice, sugar, chestnuts, Chinese dates and lotus leaves – spring rolls are a tradtional meal. Compare these with the ones you can get locally. For a real look at Chinese culture we recommend looking at http://www.cultural-china.com/