Rob and I finish teaching later than the rest of our travelling group and as a result we would be missing out a chunk of the South China travelling. This balanced out with us having extra time off for exams before the end of term so we visited Guilin ourselves; an area of China so beautiful that it features on the back of the Y20 note. We left on the Friday for the 4 and a half hour bus to Nanchang followed by a twelve hour overnight train to Guilin. The train wa...

That time I unintentionally entered a bike race… This weekend a lovely woman from school kindly invited me to Fuzhou, our nearest city, to watch a bike race. I left Rob behind for the weekend as he had a football match to play in and went off with May. Not a single person spoke any English which meant two days relying solely on Chinese. We arrived on Saturday and the next 9 hours passed in a drunken haze as I was taken to two banquets and a karaoke club w...

Last week I travelled to Chengdu which turned out to be one of my favourite places in China so far! There was some debate as to whether to go or not before-hand as it is the capital of Sichuan province where the earthquake hit. But after ringing the hostel, checking the travel advice and deliberating we decided it wasn't worth cancelling our plans. Yes there had been aftershocks but none were felt in Chengdu which was on the other side of the huge province...

Firstly, I am not near Sichuan province and haven't been affected by the earthquake! None of the PT volunteers are there at the minute. Secondly, I have not caught the latest strain of the bird flu virus which has broken out in the South East of China and there's no reported cases in our province. Although there have been in our neighbouring provinces… Seriously though we're all fine! Last Friday I caught a morning bus to Fuzhou where I planned to meet Be...

We had a train to Beijing at 04:30 followed by a connecting train from there to Nanchang where we could make our way back to Yihuang. This meant leaving the hostel at 03:00 in the morning so we just decided not to sleep in a vain attempt to make our bodies want to sleep on the trains. We spent our final night drinking and chatting with our friends before we had to say goodbye - we won't see most of them until either final travelling in summer or Beijing just ...