A few days in Nanning Our original plan was to spend just 2 nights in Nanning and get the bus to Hanoi on Friday 19th. We purchased our bus tickets, fortunately the hotel we're in sells them (although we highly expect that at the end of our journey someone will try with all their might to persuade us to stay in their hotel). As we were packing on Thursday night we thought we would just double check our Vietnamese visas. Again, very fortunate that we did so; our...

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.

In Hangzhou We set off at 6am yesterday morning and took the 6 hour train journey to Hangzhou. We arrived at midday and had some free time to do our own thing. Today, again there was another optional bike ride; some of it was through tea plantations which would have been lovely but some on the busy mad roads. Again, I chickened out; mainly because I'm not an experienced cyclist and although would ride a bike again would rather start off somewhere a little les...