We flew from Kunming to Lanzhou, then caught a long-distance bus from Lanzhou to Xining. The little time we spent passing through Lanzhou, and the even smaller amount of time I spent not asleep on the shoulder of an old man on the same bus through the city, was enough to remind me why I'd disliked it before. Xining was somehow much nicer, despite still being quite grey and dull. We set up camp in Naomi's apartment for the afternoon, showering and washing our clot...

The bus from Dali to Kunming was meant to take four and a half hours. We set off around 9.30am, expecting to arrive by 3pm, so we'd have a safe amount of time before our train at 5.30pm and the boys' flight at 9pm but, as you might have guessed from the blog title, this didn't exactly pan out. Our driver was going slowly right from the start and factoring in several long and unnecessary stops, but at 2pm, already worryingly behind schedule, the bus came to a sto...

I'd heard great things both about Dali and about our hostel there, The Jade Emu, from Nicole, who'd visited during Spring Festival, but first impressions weren't great. Our bus dropped us off by the side of a highway and we trundled past a line of small, nondescript corner-shops and up into a quiet, grey-ish neighbourhood to find our hostel. The hostel itself was nice, the late lunch we bought there was really good and the boys were happy because it had a pool ta...

Getting to Tiger Leaping Gorge to begin the two-day hike was really simple, thanks to our hostel, and with little to no effort on our part we were at the start of the trail. This first part of the walk was was easy enough; uphill, but barely, and very quickly you were high enough to be able to look down on the valley and river below. We were all equipped for the walk with plenty of water and backpacks stuffed with Oreos and Snickers bars, which appalled Carter, w...

Our train to Lijiang left Kunming at 10pm to arrive at 7am the next day, and we had hard seats. We managed to sit altogether (by making one poor man swap seats with various ones of us three times in total) so we could chat and play cards throughout the journey. Then we tried to take advantage of having a group of seats all to ourselves by sprawling as much as possible, arranging our legs in a great thatch across each others' seats so we could stretch them and put...