Greetings to all, It's been an absolute age since i sent an email to everyone but i hope to keep this short and sweet. Those who have been following our travel blog probably won't read anything new so continue at your own boredom. Also, as bebo is one of the many internet sites banned and therefore blocked here in China (along with the likes of BBC News, etc) i haven't been able to reply to people's comments, sorry. Since i last wrote we been through Thailand...

We arrived into Xi'an after what in the end turned out to be a 6 hour bus journey from Luoyang. Checked into the hostel (even though they couldn't find our booking) and just sat about chatting and chilling in the very nice hostel bar. Next day was supposed to be an early rise to see the Terracotta Warriors but it was midday by the time we got out to see them. They were amazing. However, the amount of Chinese tourists was phenomenal. It is disappointing that you ...

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...