Hua Tian Century Hotel Liuzhou

... old days, this kind of houses was very good to keep away from the beasts.<br> <br>In Chengyang Wind and Rain Bridge Scenic Area, each village at least features one drum tower. The Dong people's drum towers are used as meeting houses, and places to send signals to the entire villages. The towers have a square foundation, and appear to have many stories. In Sanjiang, the drum towers are regarded as the symbol of the Dong villages. I entered the ...

After leaving the village in the morning, we headed for Liu Zhou, a 'small' city in China (still bigger than Auckland ...). We took public buses to get there, and with all the karaoke I was reminded immediately to Cambodia ... In the evening we were invited to attend a Chinese wedding. Since to today was full moon, it is a very special day to ...

... man reached for a large bucket over which he would perform the decapitation. I was actually quite stunned that he pulled out a measly pair of scissors instead of some huge machete but oh well... With a simple motion and a shriek on my part, he snapped the head off and started draining the blood into a glass, working from the tail to the once head area. After he collected enough blood, he poured some super strong rice wine into it (I'm glad it was the nasty wine in this case) and handed ...

... the signs of tourism, but none of the tourists. We ate in a restaurant that had an impressive menu of Western foods, but what came to the table, while tasty, was unrecognizable. In the morning we took off with our smiley riverboat man . He pleased me immensely by insisting on trying to converse with us in Chinese. At that hour, when the high-rise peaks above us were blue in the twilight, the ...

... boats made of bamboo. We say, "Xie xie"(Thank-you) and the whistler kept whistling. Then we hear rushing water from up ahead and see a small dip in the river, about a metre down. We ended up going through many small rapid- like steps and each time we got pretty wet! But we never fell in! And after each dip there would be at least 3 photographers ahead of us taking pictures of our reactions going over the edge, transfering it onto the the computer (also on a Bamboo raft in the middle of ...

... to officially welcome you. Impressive stuff - all in aid of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. The thing that struck me immediately about China is the beautiful hills - the limestone karsts that you see in the paintings. Apparently we haven't seen anything yet, but the scenery so far has been lovely. The next thing that struck me about China was the queuing system - there was none. Just shove to the front and use your elbows if you have to. The next thing that ...

We had an early start from our beautiful guesthouse to the local bus station, where we would continue our journey to Liuzhou. We were thinking we'd be travelling rough, as we had started using local public buses rather than private minivans, and we weren't sure of what the standard would be. The first bus journey was about 2 hours, a normal standard coach, clean, air-conditioned and pretty OK. We stopped at the bus station to catch some lunch and ...

... follow your tour guide. It is in my experience of China without parrallel. Words alone can't really do it justice except to say that you exist here and the days drift by and there are no worries and it's easy living and...what did I do??? Yangshuo isn't about doing, it's about being. People meet and interact and you know what, most of us find we have been longer here than we planned, a lot of people come back again and again, and funnily enough ...

... was somewhat less inspiring; frankly, the hygiene situation was horrifying to me. With no-where to wash hands first, the raw chicken was prepped and chopped, all followed by the other ingredients (including the uncooked side-salad) with no washing or changing of knife or chopping board. I did at one stage see our teacher wipe her chicken-covered hands, but as this was on her trousers, I don't think it counts. I'm not even 100% sure that some of the utensils ...

... place. The bus can not get all the way up to Ping An. It lets you off and you have to hike for about 15 more minutes up the mountainside to reach the village. When we got off the bus as is frequently the case there were people there to greet us asking if we needed a place to stay. We followed one such lady up the trail to her hotel. It was an interesting place like no other we have encountered. The ...