[By the way, you’re hearing a lot from me at the moment as James is rather unwell. Send him a big electronic get-well hug!!]

Regular readers of our blog (all 2 of them – hi Mum & Dad!) will recall that we had set off from Lhasa armed with a small army’s worth of deluxe camping related gear, only to be turned back from our (eagerly) anticipated hiking route by the Chinese authorities.

Close observers may also have drawn the conclusion that our trip has, as of late, been long on adventure and perhaps a tad short on luxury.

Anyone spotting a perfect solution here??

Yes, that’s right. Before sending our cook back to Lhasa with all our associated camping paraphernalia, we decided we may as well use the stuff, if only for a night, and indulge in some luxury camping. Well, pretty luxury. I mean, the campsite we chose happened to have a fair amount of rubbish and broken glass lying round, but we picked most of it up.

What do we mean by luxury?

Well, for starters we had our own cook. I mean that’s not bad is it. Particularly when the cook is equipped with a cook tent, wok, army sized kettle and one ferocious propane burner. Even more so when said cook turns out to be a master-chef, especially of tasty stir fried vegetables – in a country where we’d basically been on a meat-only diet for the last week. Sitting on a camping mattress, eating our tasty stir fry whilst the propane burner kept us toasty (toasted?), life felt pretty darned good.

The cook. And his tent. And burner. I might be in love

And then there was the view. As the mastercard ad says, priceless.

Luxury bedding? Check. Mattresses so big and fat that I didn’t end up with bruised hips. TWO sleeping bags (try it. It’s AWESOME!!!!!!). One of those old fashioned tents you can actually stand up in. We were snug as bugs in rugs. Two rugs, to be precise.

Luxury camping toilets? Hmmm. Ok, you got me on that one but frankly, Tibetan toilets are revolting and I’d rather pee au naturel anyway.

So naturally, in the midst of all this extravagant luxuriousness, our thoughts turned to friends far away. In particular those friends who think we’re mad as hatters to be doing this kind of trip at our age (I mean really, we’ve no excuse). Stuart and Sarah may travel in SLIGHTLY more style than we have been of late, but hopefully they appreciate the effort we made here. Guys, you’ve won two new converts to the high class travel life. All we need now is more champagne.

Happy campers!!