We LOVED Shanghai. We arrived off the sleeper bus to see the start of the Shanghai Marathon and from that moment on we just got a good vibe about the place. The city has so much character and stunning architecture - a mixture of space age Transformer robot buildings, art deco Manhattan, French villas and old stone London. We absolutely fell in love with the Tianzifang area which is a rabbit warren of boutiques, bars and cafes and spent a couple of days just wa...

From Hong Kong we flew up to freeeeeeeeezing Beijing. A couple of weeks before we'd heard that the Chinese government had seeded the clouds to make it rain (so they like to meddle with nature as well as everything else), only the temperature had dropped and it snowed instead. And by the time we arrived it hadn't got any warmer... And freezing frosty weather plus Beijing's notorious smog meant that Beijing looked, well, a bit grey. Still, the red flags in Ti...

Ten hours on a sleeper bus later and we were in the bright lights of Hong Kong. Ant had told me about the delightful accommodation he'd stayed in with Toby and Matt a few years back - a maze of windowless bedsit hostels crammed into a high rise mansion block in Kowloon along with dozens of curry houses, mobile phone shops and knock off watch shops. I didn't think for one second we'd stay there on my birthday weekend, surely not... but actually it wasn't that bad ...

After a couple of big cities, we decided we were in need of some fresh air and scenery so we headed south via Guilin to the weird other-worldly landscape of Yangshuo. Very cool place and probably one of the most photographed places in China. Except our arrival in the area was greeted with lashings of rain and for the first day the limestone karst peaks (geography and geology degrees remember) were shrouded in mist. Pretty cool all the same though especially as ou...

Next stop was Chengdu following an 18-hour overnight train from Xi'an. Our cabin companions were two sad looking Chinese guys who just seemed to sleep and eat noodles and sleep and eat noodles. In fact, eating seems to be something that Chinese people do all the time. They're constantly grazing. And with so many shops and restaurants and markets, we're not surprised they're always eating. Food is literally everywhere. We ventured to a market in Chengdu where we s...