Since most of the meals were arranged for us, we had very little influence over what we ate during our tour of China. We were taken to restaurants or hotels for our meals and the group was usually split between 2-3 large round tables often in a private function room. There was always a turntable in the centre of each table upon which a selection of Chinese dishes would be placed at random times throughout the meal. These would appear in no particular order with the rice often appearing last when most of the food had already been eaten. Everyone was encouraged to eat with chopsticks, although knives and forks were usually available, and, by the end of the tour, almost everyone in our group was coping quite well with them.

Our escort and guides would often describe the culinary specialities of each region and so I was rather disappointed when none of these dishes featured in our meals since we would certainly have tried them if meals had not been included in the tour. The dishes that we were actually served were always pretty safe and mostly wouldn't have looked out of place in a Chinese restaurant back home in England. Some of the people in our group thought that the meals we had were a bit monotonous but it turned out that they were actually complaining that the meals were always Chinese - what they were expecting to get during a tour of China? The meals were actually reasonably varied when you consider that we had 2 meals a day, each including at least 6 or 7 different dishes. However, we did seem to get sweet and sour pork with just about every meal!

Having said that, only a few of the meals that we had were particularly memorable with the most memorable meal being the final one of the tour just before we left China. This was a traditional Cantonese banquet in Guangzhou and it consisted of 13 individual courses which were spread out over a 2½ hour period. Unlike the other meals, where the group just dug in to the food on the table, each of these decorative courses were served up to us individually by a waitress and many of them consisted of just a single, tasty mouthful. The highlight of the meal was a whole roast piglet that was placed on the table in front of us. This was the restaurant's speciality. First of all we were each given two small squares of the crispy skin with some sweet dumpling and spring onion sandwiched between them. The remainder of the piglet was then carved up and shared out between us but as the pig was quite young there wasn't that much meat and it was also very fatty.

Another memorable meal was the Mongolian Barbecue that we had in Shanghai. This was like a salad bar but it contained raw vegetables and assorted uncooked meat (including goat and deer). The idea was to fill a bowl with whatever you fancied, add your choice of oil and seasoning and then hand this to a chef to be cooked. This was done by throwing the contents onto a massive hot plate which would momentarily disappear in a cloud of steam. The chef would move the food around quickly with what looked like very long chopsticks for no more than a few seconds before skilfully sweeping it back into a clean bowl where the food was now only half the size it was before it was cooked.

Breakfast was provided in each of the hotels in China and was usually a generous open buffet of both Chinese and Western dishes: next to their sad attempt at sausage, bacon, egg & toast were various Chinese dishes most of which you wouldn't associate with breakfast (like fried rice and stir fried vegetables) but occasionally there were some more traditional Chinese breakfast items like congee (watery rice) and some tasty Dim Sum dishes. There was also usually some cake, bread, yoghurt, fruit and fresh fruit juices. Their coffee was usually OK but Lina consistently had trouble getting up a good cup of English tea!

As in most of the exotic countries that we visit, we had to take care over what we ate and drank in China but, once again, despite taking reasonable precautions, I (Chris) suffered from a stomach upset. Lina and her Mum were both OK, but almost half of the tour group were badly afflicted by it. One woman (the first to show any symptoms) was so violently ill during the train journey from Nanjing that she couldn't walk and had to spend the night in hospital. We're pretty sure that the last lunch before we left Nanjing was the culprit but, between us, we couldn't work out exactly what item was to blame. We're starting to think that the precautions we take with food when we are in exotic locations are pointless as there are obviously some bugs that you just can't avoid and the people who don't seem to take any care at all don't seem to be struck down any more than we do!

Hong Kong: No meals at all were provided during our brief stay in Hong Kong and since, by this time, we were eager for a change from Chinese food, we decided to eat our meals in a couple of the many Japanese restaurants that were located in the Japanese department stores near to our hotel. Apart from being both delicious and cheap, we also knew, from previous visits, that they were very quick and so they would have the minimum impact on our busy schedule during our precious few hours in one of our favourite cities.

For breakfast, however, we went out to a local Chinese restaurant for Dim Sum as our tour of China had not really done justice to this delicious and more traditional start to the Chinese day. Dim Sum, which means “little dishes”, consists of a variety of bite-sized morsels traditionally made from the scraps of food left over from the previous day’s meals and often wrapped in a kind of dumpling dough or fine Won Ton pastry and then steamed or sometimes deep fried. In some restaurants you can order these dishes from a menu but the most common way to serve Dim Sum is from trolleys which are pushed around the tables in the restaurant. Each trolley holds a small selection of dishes, usually inside bamboo steam baskets. The contents of these are written on the side of the trolley (in Chinese, of course!) and the person pushing the trolley also periodically shouts out their contents (again in Chinese). We, therefore, had to stop each trolley to have a peep inside the baskets to get a rough idea of what might be inside but, as some of these dishes looked identical, it was sometimes a bit of a gamble trying to find a particular favourite dish.