Qingdao

None of us knew what to expect from our Chinese stopover, and in the end it was probably both more and less than we'd imagined.

On the one hand, Qingdao is a large industrialised city, 7 million inhabitants, and all the standard facilities you'd expect. On the other, Chinese culture can seem impenetrable to outsiders - the crew of Singapore who complained about being overcharged by a taxi driver probably didn't expect him to be tracked down using CCTV and sacked...

The city put on a great prize giving dinner for us, complete with Chinese acrobats, dragon dancers and Tsing Tao beer drinking competition, and the crew found a regular evening drinking haunt at the aptly named New York bar.

A bit of maintenance, a deep clean, a chance to repair the kite meant we only got a solitary day off which wasn't really enough to recover from the efforts of the previous three weeks and most of the crew seemed to pick up coughs and colds just in time for our next departure. Ellen McArthur arrived mid-week as a stop in her Asia record circuit attempt, with her trimaran B&Q making the clippers look like ten little Skodas sat next to a Porsche.

And then just 5 days after our arrival, we were off again, with 5,600 miles to go before next landfall.