Back to Shanghai for some of Pete and Ros' home cooking and to do our washing before setting off for Vietnam.

Conisbee weather again, pouring rain and thick fog making it impossible to see the river banks. I went to demonstrations of Chinese embroidery, Chinese medicine and Chinese massage. At 5pm we all trooped ashore to visit Shibaozhai, a dripping gaggle of plastic poncho clad tourists. A pagoda was built as a way to access the top of a steep sided rock, and a Monastery is on the top. We didn't join the queue to walk up the 9 storeys as the cruise ships each hold abou...

An early flight to Chongqing (pronounced Chong Ching), lunch followed by a city tour. This is a modern, sprawling city, and like all the others we've visited has a huge building programme to house the people who've flocked to the cities to work. It has shipbuilding and heavy industry along the banks of the Yangtze and its tributaries. We were taken to a museum of Sichuan immigration, where we saw a typical building of the Ming dynasty (around 1723). Our guide e...

After an almighty thunderstorm overnight, Yangshuo was sunny and warm. We haggled on the quayside for a trip on a 'bamboo' raft to see the Cormorant fisherman. After a lot of shouting on her phone, the fisherman's wife rounded up her husband and son, who towed his dad's raft next to ours to a backwater where the cormorants had a noose put around their necks to prevent them swallowing their catch. We were lucky to see one of the birds catch a large fish and were d...

We arrived in Guilin on a late flight. Our guide was Yonghong, we stayed at the Sheraton. This morning we had a 40 min drive to the embarkation point for the Li river cruise through the fertile agricultural Li floodplain. Rice, beans, and brassicas are cultivated in small fields, and there were orchards lining the road. Some farmers are still using water buffalo but we also saw small tractors. Conisbee weather again today, there was mist/ low cloud obscuring t...