After more than a month in China it was finally time to leave and move onto Vietnam, a place that Gemma was especially looking forward to visiting. We'd overstayed our proposed departure date to remain in China for the Spring Festival and now that the festival was over we hoped that booking transport would be far easier. Yangshou is in the middle of nowhere and has no direct link to Hanoi, our next stop. We looked into the border crossings between China and Vi...

Whilst Guilin was a beautiful city it was nonetheless a city and not the countryside that we (especially Craig) craved. Over the last month we'd been to Hong Kong, Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, to name but a few of the megacities we had visited and some time outside of a large metropolis was felt necessary. We had heard from fellow travellers that Yangshou was a small town, in the countryside with much more beautiful natural features than Guilin. Our own research ind...

The disappointment of missing the 3 gorges cruise meant that we had 6 days spanning over the Chinese New Year (Spring Festival). We had read good things about Guilin and decided to treat ourselves to 6 days in one place. The train journey from Chongqing was uneventful and we arrived at our hostel easily with Guilin being a relatively small city. Temperatures were sub zero which we were assured was unusual for this area and much in the same way we in the UK sel...

The journey to Chongqing passed off quite uneventfully and this time we were met at the train station by someone from the hostel. As independent travellers we were a bit reluctant to be met at the train station, but Chongqing is massive (home to some 25 million Chinese) and slightly off the beaten track which means that doesn't really cater for visitors. Our hostel was really comfortable and had lots of facilities, it did however seem eerily quiet, the reason f...

Xi'an was our next stop after Beijing; however it was almost the case that we didn't make it to our destination. Train travel in China was proving more difficult than either of us had bargained for. After queuing for an hour or more upon our arrival in Beijing we managed to secure two hard seat tickets for the overnight train to Xi'an. Hard seat was not our preference, but there were no sleeping berths available and seats were our only option. When the day arrive...