I was only in Jiujiang for two days to meet up with a different group of friends to continue my travelling, but as it turned out quite a lot happened (by which I mean quite a lot went wrong), I feel it merits a blog entry of it's own. So, here's a breakdown of what went on: I arrived in Nanchang too late to catch any buses or trains so was forced to share a very expensive two-hour taxi ride back to Jiujiang with three grumpy guys who kept shouting questions I ...

28/1/13 - 5/2/13 First impressions of Sanya weren't brilliant: it was very grey, very rainy and the area we arrived at was pretty ugly too. The area surrounding our hostel was better, with less skyscrapers and more palm trees, but we were still only metres from a huge main road and I was still worried that this wasn't quite the Chinese Hawaii we'd been promised. We were all desperate for showers, but as our rooms weren't ready yet we set out in search of the bea...

We were travelling to Sanya by bus only because there were no trains available for three days either side of tour planned date of arrival. At first the six of us were very excited to see that not only was our bus bright pink and plastered with a huge portrait of Mao, but that it was a sleeper bus. 'Beds!' we thought. 'We can sleep on the journey!' we thought. At least, that's what we thought for about twenty seconds until we'd actually got a proper look at the in...

21/1/13 - 27/1/13 Guangzhou has been the first destination on my Spring Festival travel itinerary; I've been here for four days so far, with Mary, Tessa, Jony and Hannah and we are all BIG FANS. The weather is lovely: like British summer, except there's no rain and it's actually sunny, so we've been enjoying the novelty of wandering about in T-shirts. And the whole city is just the most relaxed place - all anyone seems to be doing is strolling by the river, or e...

This last week, Jiujiang played host to yet more PT volunteers as Mary, Tessa and Jony came to stay. They'd travelled down from Xinjiang, which is an enormous province in the west of China (it's roughly the size of Tibet, and about a seventh the size of the whole of China). One of the defining features of their visit was complaining about the weather in Xinjiang so, just to set the tone for this blog, here are some of their more dramatic stories/fun facts about w...