I arrived in Hong Kong via the Kowloon - Canton Railway which crosses the border from Schenzhen on the mainland. It was a pretty horrendous bus journey from Yangshou lasting 18 hours due to a 6 standstill traffic jam in the middle of the night. I was staying at a friend of mine from my ICL days, Chris, who was currently in London but had kindly left his keys with a mate for me to pick up. After the negotiating the very easy metro system to Central Hong Kong, I t...

This place was great. It is a tourist town for both Chinese and Westerners but there's loads to do and the sights are pretty special. I took a 5 hour coach from Dali to Kunming and then the hard sleeper train from Kunming to Yangshuo. I'm getting quite used to the 18 hour travelling days between places, and the trains are really good. The hole in the floor toilets that release straight onto the track are a novel idea as well! I got a bike on the first full day a...

Dali for me was just about chilling out and relaxing after the last few days in Deqin. I'd read that Lijiang was a preferable spot to Dali but I disagree and ended up staying for 5 days in the end. Lijiang old town looked all the same to me, and whilst Dali is similar it's got a bit more of it's own character I hardly did any tourist stuff whilst here with the exception of a trek up to the Zhonge temple. I went up there with a couple of lads that I'd met at the...

We arrived in Deqin after a brief stop in Shangri La with the intention of doing some more extensive trekking. The crack team was Tom (lad from Newcastle), David (New York), and Cathal (Ireland). Deqin is in the very north of Yunnan province on the borders of Tibet. Given the current situation in Tibet, this was as close as we were going to get, with 80% of it's inhabitants Tibetan. We were met off the bus by a french girl touting this trekking guest house calle...

Hey everyone, I met a few guys in Kunming/Lijiang who I've been travelling with for the last few days so I shuffled the plans around a bit, but this is what it's all about I guess. I got a 9 hour bus from Kunming to Lijiang so that I could hit the Tiger Leaping Gorge trek over the following couple of days. Lijiang is home to the Naxi people of China where the woman is most definately boss. Nowhere was this more evident that at the infamous hostel that we staye...