Alison: Hangzhou is a really lovely city. It is just outside Shanghai and is just above the province that has recently had all the floods. The weather when we were there was terrible. We spent 5 days there for some rest and rejuvenation which we just about managed (apart from the night we found a rather large bottle vodka in the supermarket...vodka is very hard to come by!). It rained practically all day everyday except the last day. We still managed to get out a...

Alison: Shanghai is a very impressive city. Very modern. It really has the wow factor. The Pudong area is the business district of the city and it is this area that provides Shanghai with its famous skyline of skyscrapers. We had been told that going to the top of the Jinmao tower which is the tallest building in China was a must for views over the city. We decided to go at night to see all the lights and the colourfully lit boats traveling on the river which pas...

Alison: Marco Polo once said that Suzhou was one of the most beautiful cities in China....well, it might have been once but the parts we saw were not very picturesque! It is another town that is criss crossed with canals which sounds nice on paper but isn't very nice when they are stagnant and full of litter. Suzhou is also well known for it's beautiful gardens which were very pretty but didn't really make up for the rest of the town. However, we didn...

Nigel: When we were in Xi'an we made a decision that we would head over to the Shanghai area, as we had more time than we thought we would originally have. It was only when we arrived there and read in our guide book, that we realised Nanjing is one of the 3 hottest places in China (aka 3 furnaces of China). We arrived off the train and tried to find the hostel, but this was not as easy to find at first. So with my fluent Chinese that I had picked up over the...

Hi All There are some more pictures in the earlier blogsHope everyone is ok.Nigel: So we arrived in Xi'an about 12 hours due southwest of Beijing after another overnight sleepless train journey. The main reason we came to this place was to see the Terracotta Warriors, but the city was really nice as well. The Warriors are located about 40 minutes outside Xi'an, which we went on an organised tour through the hostel. We had read a little about them before w...