After Shanghai the volunteers all split up and went their separate ways again. It's a real shame to think we won't see everyone in one place again until the summer now! The Direction I took with around 5 or 6 of the guys was Suzhou, one of two cities considered the most beautiful in all of China by many. One thing is for sure - it was an interesting change from the hustle and bustle of the metropolis of Shanghai going straight to a town of a mere 2 million people...

Once again I had a case of the blog delays - it's a nasty condition, i wouldn't recommend it. You end up with a big pile of work to catch up with at the end of it... Now, depite the fact that Shanghai was well over a month ago, I still feel the need to write a blog for each place we all went to during spring festival before talking about what's going on in Kuitun again (which I should add, hasn't been short of events). The Shanghai, Suzhou and Guilin blogs will ...

From Beijing we swiftly moved north to a city famous for it's frozen transformation in the winter - the former Russian town of Haerbin. 'Former town?' you may ask. Haerbin is rather close to Russia, so much so that it wasn't that long ago that the Russian border encompassed Haerbin. The Russian influences are still clear to be seen, with statues of Lenin and Stalin, and Russian architecture along the main street of the city. Everyone also assumed, us being weste...

Time to catch up with this blog! After Xi'an I didn't get many opportunities to sit down and write, so instead I will be writing one blog per location now that i'm back in Kuitun. I forgot to mention that at the start actually - I am now back in Xinjiang! Anyway, back to writing about travels. Some might say we were mad going to Beijing. After all, we had all been there in the summer, right? Well, Beijing is luckily quite a big city and there were one or two t...

This was meant to be posted 5 days ago, but as offexploring is the worst blog website since time began, it hasn't let me post it. Hopefully I will have some luck this time! Moving on from Zhangye, Xi'an was the natural next stop. Despite being there over national day 3 months ago, We had no plan on missing this lovely city out of the spring festival travels. Like Zhangye, I'll be honest, we didn't do that much. We definitely saw more of the evenings than the d...