After I booked even more planes and the route outlined more, I received an other email from Real Russia. They asked for a cover letter for my Chinese visa application. The letter should provide an explanation of overbooked Xiamen Airbnb, a missing inbound ticket from Vladivostok to China and from Hongkong to mainland China and for an explanation why I want to go to Xinjiang, to a warzone. It is war zone with no war, I mean without the thing that we consider war.

A quick disclaimer: even I mentioned Airbnb here, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. The host set the price for 50% in case of the staying extends 28 days. And apparat from the first month the cancellation was free. When I found out that I can't apply for a 90 days visa, my first thing was to cancel the last 5 weeks of the 9 weeks staying in Xiamen. However when I tried to do it, Airbnb calculated the new price without the monthly discount. So I'd pay almost the same for 4 weeks as for 9 weeks. I called their customer service and it was horrible. I spent 3 hours in the phone with some guy who wouldn't consider if it might be a problem on the website, on their end and he wanted to negotiate the host. After 3 hours he "negotiated" a new price that would be like 5% off instead of the 50. I had an other 3 hours call. Then started to talk to my Chinese host. He was very cooperative. He told me he set the discount and he doesn't understand why they are not calculating it, but he will do everything for making sure I don't pay more. The one who I had the second call with started to message me. She didn't consider that it might be an error on their side just wanted to "negotiate" again... If the host was less correct he could just keep and extra 125 quid because of the fault of Airbnb. Anyways... She "negotiated" the correct price and this time she could make the calculation properly. Later I looked up Airbnb's customer service reviews. They had 1.7/10 out of 2700 reviews. They are bad.

So my Airbnb stay is 24 days but I could cancel only to 30. So I had to explain why I booked that 6 days if I want to go to the Philippines. In the cover letter I just explained the Airbnb policy and the whole situation, without the whining.

When I talked to Real Russia they suggested if there are too many things to explain it might decrease my odds of getting my visa. So I wanted to explain as little as possible.

Tried to provide as much information as possible and get the exact number of the bus that I was gonna travel with from Vladivostok to China. I find the bus. Also wanted to provide the time table of the bus as a proof of it's existence and I could just say "yeah, I'll take the 865 bus at 11AM." I get the time table and... The bloody bus was not even operating on Sunday. The last day of my Russian visa was Sunday. So I couldn't stay to Monday, but because the planes from and into China were booked and paid already I couldn't go sooner. I needed to find something for Sunday.

Idk why but I wanted to avoid Beijing... Ending up I booked a flight to there anyways.

Although I had plans for my second entry I wanted to keep my options open. On 61seat I found this Chinese train ticket agency.(China DIY travel) They booked my Hongkong to Guangzhou ticket for a 10$ fee. If I read the full description on 61seat I'd see in the next sentence after the link that they have a 5$ discount code... The agency's services were brilliant. They sent me emails personalised to my journey and me. It felt like someone is actually taking an effort to provide me a good service. I asked them for a confirmation that I could use for my visa application they even gave me information about the visa application - it was more or less something like "don't worry about the visa!" - but still... On TripAdvisor they had 479 excellent and 4 good reviews out of 483. They made an objectively excellent job.

I had no clue about the warzone thing. I just wanted to cover as much of China as I can. I had the ticket and wasn't gonna waste it. So I called Real Russia to discuss if the Chinese could be convinced by my "why not?" explanation. Stacey said that they had a few visa rejections with better reasoning, so she doesn't think so. When I asked what I should do she just suggested to use booking and book something else and get a refundable outbound ticket from somewhere else.

My new official plan is to visit the forbidden city, the clay army , the great wall and all the stuff that probably look exactly the same on photos than leave China to Seoul.

Probably this wasn't such a cheeky trick. I think the visa centre knows it too, because they have a computer with booking.com for getting confirmation letters if they are missing. So I'd guess it's more of a formality than a practical thing.

The Chinese visa centre was a funny place tho. They had a coordinator who was just naturally a loud speaker. He reminded me the preacher guy in Chester, and I can't describe him in a more politically correct way. He was leading people to take pictures of them to take their fingerprints, he ordered them to collect their passports. Tbf it was efficient af. We could skip the queue because if Real Russia. We(two who people who applied for a visa through Real Russia and my humbleness) just handled them our documents, then photo 10 seconds, fingerprints 15 and we were good to go.

Previously I didn't know what to expect, so I left like two hours for the visa centre. In my spare time I had a coffee and breakfast in 'Look mom no hands'.

The food was surprisingly nice, the coffee was surprisingly shit and the people... Idk I had strange expectations. Like everyone cyclists, maybe curriers... But in reality I'd had been happy to hang around people who've ridden a bike before in their life at least once. At least their mug looks cool. After my London expectations let me down, my Stoke on Trent expectations did not. We had a little meeting on Jim's boat and from Stoke we canalled down to Stone in two days. Kevin just started his journey from there and I started to say goodbye.