After some deliberation we now find ourselves in Luoyang after a 9 hour train journey from Yichang on Saturday. It's a smoggy chinese city but from here we could go to the UNESCO World Heritage Longman Caves. These caves/grottoes are full of Buddhist rock carvings dating back nearly 2000 years. We went out yesterday, Chinese National Day, along with thousands of Chinese holiday-makers. The grottoes were very cool, the rock carvings were so detailed. Other th...

After 4 days and 3 nights of cruising down the Yangtze River we finally had to disembark this morning and now find ourselves in Yichang, trying to figure out where we are going to go to next and how. The President 2 was a beautiful cruiser and we thoroughly enjoyed our first ever cruise. We arrived onto the boat at 8am and were shown our room. The Presidential Suite was offered to us as an upgrade but at an additional US$400 to what we had already paid we kind...

So after alot of discussion about where to go next after Chengdu, we finally decided to go to Chongqing, a city of only 5 million people! We got here after a rather swift 5 hour bus journey and after a heated conversation between ourselves about whether we were even in Chongqing (nobody on the bus or at the station seemed to speak English and our Chinese is, to say the least, not great) and where we would go after arriving into the bus station, we finally settle...

Hello, it has been felt that I haven't been pulling my weight in writing up the blogs so I (Trish) am writing this one. We left Hong Kong and got a ferry to Schezen. This is where we entered mainland China and had one of our smoothest border crossings. We flew to Guilin, got the bus into town and stayed in a nice hotel. The next day we found the foreigner street, ie coffee shops and signs we could recognise and also very cheap internet. We spent a lot of the day...