Our accommodation in Lijiang was one of the youth hostels. Being a Unesco site the town has a large number of tourists and prices inflate accordingly, so with the prospect of a further four months on the road we took the cheaper option. Our driver telephoned ahead for directions and arranged for someone from the hostel to meet us in the town. Normally this wouldn't have been such an issue, but with about 20kg of luggage each, an altitude of 2400m /7900feet and a ...

We didn't get much chance to venture past the immediate environs of the hotel during our stay in Kunming due to the heavy rain which came in torrents leaving huge puddles and wet natives. We did however manage to make it the ticket office to book two of our upcoming sleeper train journeys. In China there are numerous options when choosing seat types. On overnight trains the favourite option is often soft sleeper, four beds per lockable cabin in bunk style, with b...

Hooray, we've survived the Chinese sleeper train, and are here in Kunming. We left Gangzhou on our first Chinese sleeper train, the 16 hour Z211 at 19:42. We'd arrived at the station in good time to face our first challenge - making sense of the Chinese way of doing things. There were a number of queues heading into the station, all numbered. We looked on the large display and noticed our train had a number four on the same line ( thankfully the Chinese also use ...

I'm beginning to think that the ease or otherwise of obtaining a visa is somewhat proportional to the level of chaos and disorder you find when you get there. As you'll know if you've read the Hong Kong blog the China visa process resulted in a serious rethink of the itinerary. The overland crossing to Shenzen was researched to within an inch of its life and we felt confident that the crossing would be pretty straightforward. Indeed the port was also on the subwa...