Hello from Guilin, we arrived this afternoon following a 26 hour train journey . . . Made especially enjoyable by our room mate who saw fit to start a loud conversation at 4am thismorning . . . I gave him the angry claire stare and he shut up . . .

The panda research centre was brilliant - we saw about 5 groups of pandas of all different ages and got to go into the baby incubation area to see the really little ones. They have succesfully bresd over 90 pandas at the base scince the 70s. Which is a good thing as there are less than 100 left in the wild. We also saw red pandas who put on a bit of a show climbing trees for us.

The opera was fun to, there was lots of gongy music and stunning costumes. I really liked the ladies who threw their long sleeves around. The last act was the 'Changing Faces' something peculiar to the area - the performers have several masks on and change them so fast you can't see them move its very impressive.

We were glad for our longer than scheduled stay in Chendu (due to silly trains) as we were both quite ill. Nothing 3 days of eating exclusively western food couldn't fix - on the mend now. Let's just say we are picking our street food more carefully, you live and you learn.

We just checked into the Wada hostel here in Guilin and plan to go down river in a few days to Yangshuo which is more in the countryside - hope to do some cannoing and cycling. Then onto Hong Kong for about 5-6 days.

Anyway chris has just come back from the shop with some nondescript beer - so see you later!

Mrs P

P.S Sorry for all the trully awefull speling misttakes in the blog so far . . .