Guo Tai Hotel Guiyang

... here, Guiyang at 6pm, for a taxi driver to then take us round the block (and about 2 doors away from the bus station we got off at!) to our hotel for 10yuan, nevermind.<br>The hotel is clean, with aircon and a soft bed (3 things that your lucky to get in a chinese hotel) the bathroom is completely covered in plastic. It is literally a porta-loo cabin complete with sink, bath and step in shower, just placed in the corner of the ...

Hi - 17/8 Arrival at Kaili<br>We are in China!<br>We had spent 30 hours of 3 flights - all good, specially Air Uzbekistan, then a bus to Guanyang - a big city, 1.2 million people: a modern place, 20-30 stories buildigs, wide road, full of new cars and well-dressed people. The streets look so clean, quite. Lotteries on streets!<br>We took the bus to Kaili - 2.5 hours, new road (you pay for passing it).<br>Kaili is a Miao city - looks ...

So, last night we had the fourth gig which was a chilled out place...but not as many people or not as much energy as the other gigs...which have been awesome!!! there's some photos up from the Chongqing gig on soundsmakers.com - check them out!!<br>It will be nice to not have a gig today I think! just chill out all day, go out for lunch with the owner of the club we were at last night and maybe some other people, and then catch the train (a sleeper ...

Fri.22nd May. Xingyi - Guiyang.<br><br>Off at 8am and less than 30minutes into our drive...major attractions. Suspension bridge and a waterfall of many metres at Malinghe Gorge. This very deep gorge is known as (in Chinese) the Worlds Most Beautiful Scar. To view this gorge we could have gone down in a glass sided lift but we decided to take the pic's from a rickety old bridge that the adjacent new suspension bridge will replace. Actually, Dave took those pic's - it was ...

... on the scenic and cultural attractions of Xijiang, instead of just a beautiful face. A Xiang-yi sees it differently. "Every villager is an ambassador of Xijiang," she said. "Besides, you can find girls much more beautiful than I everywhere in the village." A Xiang-yi said she has more important tasks to concentrate on for now - with the May Day holiday approaching, she has to get ready and train dozens of staff members for a tea-tasting fair. "It will be three hectic days," she said.

... to see there, a waste of time. Buy some fruit and sweets for supper in the train, and we are left at Guiyang train station, among milions of chinese people. The train has no closed cabins, and we must sleep in the beds in the middle of the corridor, more than 80 persons per wagon. This will really be an experience. Tomorrow we arrive in Guilin, after more than 17 hours in the train. I wonder if it is worth saving the hotel to suffer all this.

... capital of the province. Check in, a short walk, and buy something for supper in a supermarket: some dehidrated noodles, to which you only have to add some boiling water to cook them. Very cheap and tasty! It's been almost 1 week since we saw last non chinese person! Incredible, we thought we would find thousands of tourists everywhere, visiting China during Olympics, but we were wrong.

... were easy to grow, even in the harsh climate, and its harvest time was earlier than the other crops so that the people had a more consistent supply of food. Even now, along with corn, potatoes are the main food source for the villagers around Stone Gateway. Today, the church's population is no more than 100; the number of Christian believers has dropped sharply compared to in Pollard's period when thousands of people were coming to church ...

... brazier or fried in a large wok. Needless to say, the smell as you walked down the road was more than interesting, although the pungent stench of the cabbage soaked tofu is not always one to set the taste buds racing. It was a struggle not to want to try everything on offer though, although the fact that at random we seemed to choose the most expensive barbecue on the street to sit down at went some way to controlling the greed inspired by such a cocktail of edible aromas ...

... a slate roof. As we walked from room to room we often hit our heads in the doorways, as the Miao people are somewhat shorter than the Chinese. This paired with the difficulty Jack had sitting on the six inch tall stools they use provided endless entertainment for our host family. We spent the night sitting around with our family. Late in the night I slipt into my room, lay down and pulled a thick embroidered quilt over me. The mist from the mountains and the valley swept me off into sleep.