So long mainland China and hello Hong Kong! The mainland had given us a pretty good idea of Chinese society so we were interested to see what life was like in one of the SARs and boy, were we in for a treat. After a hundred years of British rule and serving as a refuge for dissidents and melting pot of different cultures, Hong Kong has a character as idiosyncratic as it is cosmopolitan. Soho is full of Western flavours, from British Pubs to French Bistr...

Hey everyone We have just arrived very late into Guilin after missing two pre booked trains and frantically getting a five hour bus to Changsha, and then 14 hours in a 3rd Class train cabin with 60 other people all crammed in. We have now seen the best and worst of Chinese transport. Luke and I had two top bunks, there were two below us and we couldn't even roll over. Oh well it was an experience and only cost 13 pounds each. We were woken up in Guilin at 7pm...

Hey everyone We have just arrived very late into Guilin after missing two pre booked trains and frantically getting a five hour bus to Changsha, and then 14 hours in a 3rd Class train cabin with 60 other people all crammed in. We have now seen the best and worst of Chinese transport. Luke and I had two top bunks, there were two below us and we couldn't even roll over. Oh well it was an experience and only cost 13 pounds each. We were woken up in Guilin at 7pm...

After our big city adventures and visit to the Pandas, we figured we had seen enough Chinese culture for a while, and so we headed to reknowned beauty spot Wulingyuan National Park near the small town of Zhangjiajie. While the town availed us of some fond memories (the friendly noodle man, getting ridiculously drunk in the On The Road Bar) it was the park itself that took our breath away. According to the Chinese tourism agency, it was the towering and precario...

Hello We are currently in Chengdu, in the Sichuan Province, or in other words Panda Land. We only have one day here so it is pretty action packed, we took off to the Giant Panda Research centre, where they are researching panda breeding. It is the biggest population of pandas in captivity, and somewhere where they have actually got pandas to breed which is no small thing. There are 40 giant pandas there, with numerous babies and red pandas. It was the coolest pl...