Zhiyin Hotel Wujiang

... rivers and down silent rural paths. After donning protective helmets we entered the creepy, dripping cave by boat, then spent the next 3 hours scrambling up and down slippery rock staircases. The high point of the tour had to be the mud bath...which was too much fun to describe!

... favourable comments by happy customers. He then tried offering the tours to us for Y700 because of some supposed "birthday". Later Larry went through it all again with us and managed to wear us down, by letting us choose the items we really wanted. We succumbed and agreed to a package including a boat ride to see night cormorant fishing, a bike trip to do bamboo rafting, explore the Water Cave and climb Moon Hill, tickets to the Sound and Light Show, which we had already ...

... ladies were huddled around a small "fire" (really just a small thing of coals) trying to stay warm. After about 30 mins of freezing my butt off I said lets give it a go and about 5 minutes into that I decided it was time to take my soaked behind back to the hotel to try and thaw out. Meanwhile I had given the rest of my clothes to the hotel for laundry and they were hanging out to dry, maybe ready in 24 hours - sweet! Went back to my room with a broken heater ...

After having spent the last few days in front of the computer I felt like it was time to get off my butt and go for a bike ride. I strategically left an hour after every other tourist (just about everyone that comes here goes for one) so I could have some peace and quiet on the trip. But it did not take the ...

... cafees, first to come in mond was Lucy's with great food and its lovely people. Chinese people are great with their endless giggling and helpfulness (even though no English is really spoken). At Lucy's cafe we actually tried to taugh few local girls with their English- I have no clue whether we were actually any help or on the contrary :) Some more walking took place in the local parks to watch old men playing board games and by climbing some of the nearby ...

As Bali is to Indonesia, so Guilin is to the Chinese. From landing in Beijing, the locals would ask with undisguised pride if I was planning to visit this city in Guanxi province, south of the Yangtze. Guilin is actually a fairly typical large Chinese city, which would be virtually indistinguishable from the rest if it wasn't for the fact that the urban sprawl is regularly punctuated by bizarre limestone upthrusts on ...

May 2nd - 16th Guilin / Yangshuo The train journey to Guilin from Kunming was one of the most, if not the most atmospheric we've experienced so far. This was due to a number of factors... the season, the time of day, and the scenery, all of which combined to create a unique and memorable journey. The train left Kunming around 3:30pm in the afternoon which meant we passed through the most spectacular scenery around dusk. As the evening light began to dim the train rattled along the ...

... in which the tired traveller learns to relax, sings 'Happy Birthday' to 70 elated Chinese kids, and pedals between natural skyscrapers... GUILIN & YANGSHUO After two days of incessant rain in Shanghai, I got a soft sleeper berth on the train to Guilin, 1700km southwest of Shanghai for about 500 yuan; a journey of 28 hours, the longest I've been in a train. I could have flown, but would have landed in equally foul weather and would have been confined to a hotel room for ...

Ha ha ha ha ha, Oh deary me! Yesterday we somehow managed to block our hotel loo (only toilet paper!) so it was ok to let out the odd number one, but a number two would have been a definate no no..but by midnight poor guy was getting desperate to empty his bowels (which I'm sure you all wanted to know!) so he went downstairs with the chinese phrasebook and pointed to the appropriate phrase in the book (about the loo being blocked, not the fact he needed a poo ...

Nee Hao, We've finally arrived in China, but what a hassle we had getting here! We had to get a train to the chinese border, which was easy enough but that's where the trouble began! We'd read that from there it was easy to get the bus to Yangshuo....oh how wrong that was! We got there and there were 3 different bus stations, which we wandered around for 2 hours in the boiling heat with our backpacks on before we gave up and just sat down ...