We managed a couple of hours' sleep after our sunrise swim before Beth dragged us out out of ours beds and bullied us into town to try and organise our route onwards. First we needed to go back to Guilin to collect our big bags from our last hostel, then we would go on to Kunming. We had no idea how we were going to manage this, so a chaos of chasing each other through Yangshuo, panicking in tourist offices and corralling people towards the private bus we'd manag...

We were still soaking from our jump into the river when we were dropped off in Yangshuo. Yangshuo ass a really pretty town: completely surrounded by mountains, full of cobbled streets and winding alleys and free of the huge, ugly skyscrapers that Chinese cities are so fond of. It was extremely touristy though; all of those winding alleys were bursting with souvenir shops, bars and restaurants and there were more foreigners concentrated on the streets than I've se...

On Wednesday morning we piled onto a coach with all of our bags to make our way to Yangshuo, via the Li river and Yulong village. We were accompanied by the world's most enthusiastic tour guide, Yang, who talked non-stop in a mixture of English and Chinese for the entirety of the bus journey and was a big fan of audience participation: "My name is Yang - now practice it, Yang! Yang! Yang! Yes, good..." etc. At first I hated him for ruining my on-the-bus nap-time ...

Beth, Cat and I arrived in Guilin on Monday morning. Our hostel was only a short walk from the train station so we should have been there within twenty minutes of leaving the train but, because we're idiots, we walked straight past it and instead spent a good hour hauling all of our bags several kilometres down the road. Everybody we asked for directions would point in different directions and suggest random arrival times, including the receptionist at a hotel wh...

This should just be a short one to fill in the gaps between Hong Kong and the official start of summer travelling. I went back to Chongren with the girls, arriving early on Wednesday morning. The next day I caught the bus to Yihuang, where Rob and Dan live and the only one of the Jiangxi projects I hadn't yet visited. Yihuang's only an hour from Chongren and the two are really similar, both in terms of size and in their relationship with the PT volunteers, which ...