The hostel we'd found online was a nice cosy place just by the South gate of the Xian city walls. There were many Western tourists and the staff all spoke good English, it felt very much like a rest after the trials of the past few days. Sadly, however, Taiyuan would keep rearing its ugly head in the form of dodgy stomachs that both Dave and I were suffering from for over a week afterwards. Indeed, my first toilet experience in Xian ended in the sacrifice of a pa...

It was with relief that we checked out of the hotel, we really hadn't warmed to Taiyuan and were looking forward to heading on to Xi'an, home of the terracotta warriors and a more tourist-oriented city, hopefully it would be easier to get around and get what we wanted there! Before that, though, we had the day to visit Pingyao. We headed to the scrum of the bus station and fought our way through another throng of touts to get the public bus to Pingyao. We squeeze...

Our only two reasons for being in Taiyuan were to visit Pingyao, a town almost entirely still as it was a century ago, and the Shanxi Museum, listed as one of the best for English tourists in China. Therefore our first job was to secure our onward journey. One of the biggest headaches in China is that you can only buy train tickets from the station you are at so by the time you arrive and try and buy your onward ticket the trains have already been sold out. This ...

On our last day in Beijing we wanted to have a look round the Summer Palace. We checked out, put our bags into storage behind reception at the hostel and headed out to the metro, crossing Beijing then hopping into a taxi for our final leg out there. The Summer Palace, we soon discovered, is less a Palace than an enormous area of Gardens, Temples and lakes the size of a small town. We wandered Longevity Hill by the entrance and looked in on halls and gardens dedi...

After the trek on the wall we rewarded ourselves with a bit of a lie-in and rose at 10 to try and organise our onward travel. We'd been told by our hostel reception that the train down to Taiyuan was already full until after the weekend but that if we wanted the bus instead we could just turn up at the bus station and jump on the next one without a problem. We decided to pop down the tourist information office just to check this was true. Now this should have be...