Today was Liam's birthday, the big 2-2, but not particularly eventful unfortunately. We were scheduled to spend the day travelling back to Guilin to pick up our rucksacks, via various modes of transport, followed by another overnight train to Hong Kong. The weather had cleared up quite significantly overnight, which meant that during breakfast we could see right across the valley, and realised that actually we were very high up! A few of us left earlier than the...

Yesterday morning we had to get up pretty early for our transfer to Guilin by public bus. It took 2 buses to get to the nearest town with a railway station - where we left our big rucksacks in a storage centre for a couple of days while we went to the Longji Rice Terraces. It took another couple of bus journeys through the hairpin bends to get to our destination, and even then it took another 40 minute walk with our daysacks up the hills to get to our hostel in t...