We have not been able to buy many souvenirs along the way due to our limited luggage capacity! We wake up to discover that Nico (a fantastic illustrator) had given us a very special present to remember the trip by - the best Ortlieb panniers available!
That night the landscape is bathed in truly beautiful light and we watch thunderstorms roll across a plain below us.
As ever, children on bikes follow us out of town.
We stop for a quick rest and are soon joined by two monks driving to the next village. We have a chat but we still can't get used to the sight of monks with mobile phones wearing trainers and riding motorbikes!
Tibetans have very distinctive clothing. The massive coral beads are very fashionable amongst the men!
We stumble across a temple village and are invited in for salty yak butter tea by two elderly monks. They serve the tea from a huge pot over a fire and carve a slab of (rancid) yak butter into each bowl. 
A grave-yard
The next day we reach the town of Hongyuan. It is quite a big place with a strong military presence. We don't hang around but shortly after leaving Ed starts feeling unwell. We push on for the rest of the day, but as we leave a small village, about 10km from Longriba, Ed gets severe pain in his stomach. It becomes clear that this is not just a bit of toilet trouble and squatting in a field is not going to help. Within a few minutes he is lying in the foetal position unable to move. As this moment Helen knows the trip has come to an end, Ed just knows pain. Helen, Nico and Sarah flag down a passing police car.
Apparently not really knowing what to do, the policeman lights a cigarette while his colleagues enthusiastically get out their digital cameras and, laughing, take pictures of Ed! We try to communicate using a phrase book that we would like to call a doctor, but they do not seem to understand. We are a long way from any big town and the situation is looking fairly worrying: we have no idea where the nearest medical facilities are. Sarah, a trained nurse, is pretty sure Ed has a kidney stone. This is a relief as at least it's not appendicitis! However he is in extreme pain and can't pee, which could become serious if the pressure builds up too much.
On a dying mobile phone battery hooked into our solar charger, Helen manages to contact the British embassy - it is amazing how even the most remote places in China always have mobile phone reception - and a helpful staff member translates for us and explains to the policeman that we need to find a hospital.
Eventually Ed is transferred into the back of a transit van and we bump our way back to Hongyuan.
The hospital in this very remote region of China seems fairly basic. However, the doctor, who speaks some English, quickly confirms a kidney stone using ultrasound. The dirty conditions in the hospital are a bit worrying and it is difficult to be sure all aspects of the intravenous equipment are sterile, so to be on the safe side we refuse an infusion of unidentifiable drugs. Ed self-prescribes some antibiotics we are carrying. He has manged to pee, so the worry about the build-up of pressure that might damage his kidneys has passed. It looks as if he is going to have to sit out the pain.
Ed is discharged and we are taken to a hotel by the police where we plan our next step.
We had been aiming for the huge city of Chengdu, which we had decided before setting off from Xining, was going to be the final destination of our trip. We know it has a well-equipped hospital, but it is still about 300km away and over 20 hours on bad roads by car. Helen starts to ring round travel agencies listed in our guidebook to find out if we can hire anyone to drive us to Chengdu the next day. She spends a long time on the phone with a number of extremely helpful people, but the same story always emerges: No one is willing to drive us out of the area. Apparently the police have placed a ban on taxi drivers carrying foreigners.
A trawl of the market the next morning reveals no more. No one can be persuaded to take us to Chengdu. Once we have exhausted all the options, Sarah and Helen go back to the police with an extremely helpful student who is determined to try and help us. Our aim is to try and get written permission to leave the area by car. The police are not best pleased to see us. Probably they had been relieved to get rid of the extremely pesky ill foreigners the day before. They send us to the "foreign affairs" bureau. In the end we sit in a meeting involving the major, head of police and head of the hospital who discuss Ed's case at great length. They insist we cannot drive out by car. Instead they allowed us to hire an ambulance to take Ed to the nearest airport 5 hours away, from where we can fly to Chengdu. They say they will take care of our bikes and send them on to us. With a heavy heart, because it might be the last we see of our bikes, Helen has no option but to agree with the plan. We barely have time to rush back to the hotel to get Ed ready, thank the kind student who helped us and say goodbye to Nico and Sarah , before we are in the ambulance. We bump along (with Ed screaming at every bounce - no bed, just the floor or a hard bench to sit on) to the airport. We arrive to find someone waiting to check us in. Helen hands over the money and passports and we rush onto the plane. Barley five minutes later we are in the air, high above the mountain passes we would have cycled through. Thirty five minutes later we are being whisked in a taxi through the hot urban jungle of Chengdu.
At the hospital in Chengdu, people crowded into consulting rooms waving brain scans and sick babies around but everything is amazingly efficient. A local hostel has arranged a translator for us who is amazing. Soon Ed has had some tests and is hooked up to a drip. The ambulance ride had been quite tough, but did seem to dislodge or disintegrate the kidney stone because a follow up scan after a number of hours in hospital revealed that it had gone! By now Ed is also feeling a lot better.
Eventually at 3.00 in the morning we crawled bleary-eyed into our hostel bed, incredibly grateful that we are safe and thankful to everyone who helped us. Next morning we have to face the fact that the trip is really over. Being forced to take the plane at the very last minute is a big disappointment . We have no idea how our friends Nico and Sara are doing and hope they did not get into trouble with the police once we left. We don't have our bikes and are not sure we will see them again.......
Find out how we get home in the next couple of days :-)
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