Yangshuo has been fab and much needed. Nice to finish China on a high note too. We stayed at Sudder St, a new guesthouse only open for 4 months and whose design is up for some awards. Our room with floor to ceiling glass window opening onto a balcony overlooking rice paddies and fishing ponds, with the ubiquitous karst formations in the background, cost us £12 a night. One of the cheapest rooms we've secured whilst here. The downstairs communal area was a great ...

Well, it's been a little warmer here than Beijing, but also very very wet! Our arrival didn't go too well either. For the second time in two months, Tony's bag never made it. Thankfully the airline delivered it to our hostel the next afternoon. Hopefully this will be the last time our bags go missing! Guilin doesn't really offer much, the sites it does have, an extortionate entry fee is charged. We walked along the river and as w approached a rock where a natural...

Xi'an, Pingyao and Beijing. 23 Nov - 2December Heading towards the end of our China travels, flying from Beijing to Guilin to sample rural China with rice terraces, cycling through little villages in the countryside, bamboo rafting down the Li River and the stunning karst scenery the area is famed for. We could have caught another overnight train and whilst I don't mind them, the thought of spending twenty hours cooped in a cabin with two strangers and tons of b...

20 November It seems our luck at avoiding crowds has come to an end. We've spent the day at Jûzhaigōu National Park and it's quite possibly my worst national park experience, ever. The guide books has said it was busy and I'd even read that they limit entry to 40,000people per day! I thought no way will there be that many people. It's mid November and everyone tells us it's low season and buses aren't even running any longer to go north. I was wrong. We arri...

Yunnan 8-16 November We're six days into our China travels and things are easier than we expected. Nearly everyone we had spoken to said China wasn't a great place, was really difficult to travel, the people were rude and it wasn't clean. Needless to say we were slightly apprehensive but ready for the challenge. Our experience so far couldn't be further from that. Yes, very little English is spoken, no signage is in English other than at airports, menus are gen...