Alison: We arrived in Fenghuang by bus and were dropped off at the station which was in the middle of nowhere. We had the address of our hostel written down in English which was a big mistake because most people can't speak any English. Even if you have the address in Chinese, it is still difficult to get a taxi. They always stop if they are empty but if they don't fancy taking you to where you want to go, they just say 'no' and wheel spin off! Eventually we got someone to take us but after a lot of driving around it became apparent he didn't know where he was going. We asked to get out of the taxi close to the central area and he charged us twice what it said on the meter! Initially we dissagreed but he got a bit annoyed and our stuff was locked in his boot so we had to pay up. Luckily, he had actually dropped us round the corner from our hostel which lifted our mood slightly. Despite this poor introduction to the place, Fenghuang was a lovely ancient riverside town and was well worth visiting. The river is amazing. Really clear and fresh looking and lots of little waterfalls. The banks are lined with traditional Chinese houses on stilts and small pagodas. We walked up the river at night time and it was very pretty. Lots of nice lighting and large crowds of people pushing candles out in to the river on a range of very intricate paper vessels in the shape of flowers, hearts, boats. Fenghuang is a very relaxing place to go and it's possible to spend hours just walking around the river and the surrounding winding alleys. We did notice that there weren't many westerners there at all and we think that this is probably because it is quite difficult to get to but we were glad we made the effort.

Nigel:As Alison mentioned Fenghuang was a very beautiful place with its main attraction being the river that created a hive of activity night and day. The central section of the river had several crossing points, these included 2 wooden plank bridges and individual stepping stones with just over a foot gap between each one. Watching people wobble across made us initially nervous and apprehensive about crossing ourselves but we both decided we couldn't leave Fenghuang without attempting it. The sensible thing would be to cross it in daylight when the area tends to be less crowded. Even though we hadn't had anything to drink that evening our confidence was so high we thought it would be safe to cross in the dark. We knew that if disaster struck and one of us did fall in, the water wasn't that high and we would be able to get out safely. So with camera, passport and money on us we started to cross. We were about 2 or 3 steps in when we noticed that nearly everyone in Fenguang had decided to cross at the same time . The problem is that once your on, you cant easily turn back with out the risk of knocking several people into the water, so we slowly crossed praying every step we took and celebrating when we reached the end.

Other weird and wonderful additions when walking down the matrix of alleys, you would come across several live animals in cages or tanks waiting outside for the next hungry customer. Included in this list of animals were, rats, guinea pigs, tortoises, fish,chickens and they even had a pigs face. Its hard to describe but basically its the pigs face cut off, flattened and hung up to to dry. One of them had its eyes still in place, which was not the greatest site we have seen on our travels. Luckily seeing these itms didn't make neither of us want to turn vegetarian and we stumbled across an excellent night market which sold a spectrum of different culinary foods. One thing we weren't aware of when we sat down to eat was that we would be hassled throughout the meal b child beggars trying to sell stuff to us. It didn't matter how many times you would say no or go away (in the nicest possible manner) they would still stand and stare at you whilst you ate. One even started thumping me on the back in the form of a massage. Even though it relived some tension, it did start getting annoying. We did manage to leave the market without purchasing anything from the beggars. However we don't think they understand that even we're on a budget and if the money runs dry we might be joining them so we can see out the 12 months.