I left Jingtai to get back to Zhongwei, but a few hours later, I got a message from Kelly in Beijing that they had been able to find the GPS that my brother sent a couple of weeks ago. Now, isn’t that strange – it was sent to Jingtai a long time ago, went missing, but when Kelly starts poking around, it suddenly shows up again. I don’t want to risk losing the GPS again, so therefore I will go back to Jingtai a final time tomorrow to collect it in person. It is going to be really good to have a GPS with a lot of memory and fairly good maps of the roads in China.

Many thanks to Kelly, Pingping and their secretary for following up the GPS issue from Beijing. I’m very grateful for the help guys!!   🙂

After coming to Ningxia, I have had a lot of positive experiences. The people seem nicer and more open than what I have experienced generally, so far. Today, I needed to take out some money from a bank using my MasterCard. I asked a couple of young girls the location of the nearest bank. They didn’t just point me in a direction, but accompanied me to the bank. The bank didn’t accept my card, so we tried another bank across the street. That didn’t work either, and by this time the manager of the bank had got himself involved.

The manager got hold of a taxi and the four of us went to a Bank of China office. I was very grateful for their help, withdrew money, and wanted to pay for the taxi. But the bank manager had beaten me to it. I felt almost ashamed to have used so much of the two girls’ and manager’s time, but they all seemed very happy to have solved my problem. Episodes like this really make me grateful and make the whole experience of travelling in a foreign country a lot more pleasurable.