On board the 5:02pm to Nanning Yesterday after checking out of the hostel, we wandered around the back streets of Nanjing Road; for some reason not many tourists were around here even though it was literally steps away from the tourist street. It was interesting; lots of little shops, businesses and street sellers. One of particular note was a lady selling crabs; one of which had made a mad dash for freedom down the road. Of course this new found freedom was s...

Final farewells, ticket confusion and an excursion to the hairdressers On Friday (12th) when we arrived in Shanghai, we had the day free so Matt and I set off to try and buy us some train tickets for our onward journey. We have to travel from here to Nanning (in the south), then from Nanning to a small town called Pingxiang at the Chinese border. We leave China and cross the Vietnamese border then it'll be roughly a 6 hour train / bus journey from there. So, we...

Have been in Shanghai for past few days; will update soon. Tomorrow we head to Nanning by overnight train - where we will then suss out the best way to cross the border into Vietnam. We are keeping an eye on weather in Vietnam since a typhoon hit central Vietnam about 10 days ago (not an area we're going to) just in case anyone had heard of this and started to worry.