Well, our trip to Ping'an in Longsheng province, to visit the famous rice terraces, was quite an adventure! Unfortunately this is me trying to re-write the blog from Hong Kong, as we arrived back here this evening, as for some reason the one I tried to send early this morning wouldn't work. Also there was no picture of the Longji rice terraces in the STA website photo library, so these are something simillar from Pakistan! We were sad to leave the Li River Retre...

Quite a lot of rain overnight and the occasional clap of thunder, woke up to drizzle this morning and a bit of travel fatigue! As a result, we took ages to decide what to do, but eventually decided to make the most of our last day here, as we're off to Ping'an tomorrow, to see the famous 'dragon's backbone' rice terraces. Apparently our hotel there is built in the traditional style of the area, (which means it's made of wood and 30 minutes walk uphill from the ne...

Hello again from Yangshuo. We've had another very interesting day! We' d booked a taxi for 8am, to take us to Yangdi, about an hour's drive away, so we could get a bamboo raft down the river to Xingping (about a 2 hour journey on the water) then a local bus back to Yangshuo. Sounds simple in theory......but this is China, and nothing seems to be completely straightforward! The taxi turned up on time, and we were just slightly apprehensive when we saw it was the s...

So here we are in China! We had a lot of hanging around at the airport yesterday, as we got there early, but then our flight was delayed by an hour and then we sat for quite a while on the Tarmac before we got the all clear to take off. We were served jasmine tea and biscuits on the short one hour flight to Guilin. We were met by our pre-booked taxi, and as the driver didn't speak a word of English and we didn't speak any Mandarin, we had a rather silent journey ...

We arrived in Hong Kong on Friday night and were transported at breakneck speed to our hotel in a red 'urban' taxi. We're staying at an Ibis hotel, and our room could be described as 'bijou'! However, it's on the 25th floor, with a large window looking out over the water and all the high-rise buildings and hills on the Kowloon side, so it feels much more spacious than it actually is. They also have a great 'all you can eat' buffet breakfast, (well, I don't know i...