The fact that I am writing this blog entry nearly a week later on a sunny morning in a park in Hong Kong should give you enough indication that I've had a fairly busy time up until now. So, where did I leave off? The trip to Yangshuo was an early morning affair, the train pulling into Guilin at around 5:30am and our private minibus taking us the rest of the way, arriving before 7am. Yangshuo is drop-dead gorgeous and relatively teeming with westerners, which lik...

I'm writing this on a bus heading away from the beautiful Three Gorges. The bus takes another three hours to get to a train station where we are destined to take a thirteen-hour night train to another bus. I get the feeling I'll have a long time to write this... So, we started in Yichang and were told to stock up for a day and a half on the boat on the Yangtse river. I went a bit overboard (no pun intended) and bought ten quid's worth of food and drink, includin...

Well there was always going to be someone who'd be late for the bus, and with Max getting in at 5am and me sleeping at 3am, you wouldn't have got great odds on correctly guessing it'd be us. The bus took us to the train station where we hopped onto the 8:40 day train to Yichang. Mine and Max's grand plan to get a quick McDonald's (yes, entirely traditional - you have no idea how many McDonald's there are in Chinese cities) was scuppered by us waking up far too l...

I think today in Xi'an was probably the most British weather I've encountered since my soggy day walking to Lukla all those weeks back. We got in at about 9:30am following another successful night train for me. Several others had the same problems as before, and I was universally resented once more. This train took a lot longer than last time so we decided to pass the time by drinking, of course. The guards did their best to shut us up, including tactics like cla...

Well, that worked. Almost too well! We got on the sleeper train at around 9:30pm after a few mishaps on the way. Most of these stemmed from the choice of a Samsonite suitcase for each of the Leicester-based girls. I get the feeling they'd regret their choice as their six month trip wore on. We then got a bit stuck on the train waiting for people to haul themselves and their gear up to the third bunk. I was on the third bunk too and to be perfectly honest I though...