The 19th October was a purely travelling day. A 50 minute flight, a 1 hour 30 minute flight and a 1 hour 30 minute bus journey managed to stretch from 8am to 6:30 pm. Of the journey the only real events worth mentioning were finding a very satisfying Chinese newspaper article and finding out that Kaka also believes in the miracle of Mr Zhu’s Golden throat lozenges. When we arrived in Yangshuo, which was a lot touristier than I had anticipated, we had something ...

We arrived at the gorge at about 10am. Formed when a river passed through Jade Dragon Snow Mountain and Haba Mountain, legend says a tiger jumped the narrowest point of the gorge to evade a chasing hunter. The trek started on a paved road and after 20 minutes Terry and myself were wondering if this would be the hiking equivalent of our bike ride in Dali. Thankfully it wasn’t, shortly concrete turned to dirt as we passed through the villages of Landou and Nuo Yu...

We arrived in Lijiang after 3 hours on a bus that even Asian people would find cramped (one of the downsides to travelling through Asia I have found is that items such as beds and seats on public transport are a lot smaller than back home). We walked to the old town while our bags were taken by rickshaw and booked into our guesthouse. During the afternoon I explored the labyrinth that is old town Lijiang. The maze of narrow streets turn left and right, opening ...

Kunming was a transfer city so very little happened. We left the monastery in the morning and drove back to Chengdu and from there flew south to the Yunnan province and the city of Kunming. In the evening we had something to eat and watched a show, we were also joined by a new girl from Ireland called Aisling. The bus journey from Kunming to Dali lasted about 5 hours. There wasn’t much to do after checking in so a quick walk around the old town was followed b...

I completely forgot it was my birthday; even after all the talk about it until Derek reminded me as we were getting on the bus for Leshan. After the 3 hour journey we arrived at Leshan’s Giant Buddha. The Buddha is carved into the cliff face overlooking the Dadu and Min rivers and at 71m high is the largest stone Buddha in the world. Firstly we viewed the statue from the river then took the 300+ steps up the cliff to the statues head. We then trekked down to th...