Liuyuan Hotel Liuzhou

Today we jumped on a public bus and went to Liuzhou which is a "typical" Chinese city and definitely off the tourist trail!! On the way there we went through the most modern city I have seen, every building (no exaggeration) was less than 10 years old and the amount of building work that was happening there was crazy, cranes littered the sky! An...

My first impressions of China (besides those that I had formed in my head) were established at the land border when I was randomly denied access and asked to wait for about 30 min, with the rest of the group looking on as I stared from the Vietnam side. I smiled politely at the guards, answered any relevant questions and still, without explanati...

Minutes before dawn, Dan and I are drenched in sweat and standing on top of Yangshuo's smallest peak. I look at the city below us, wrapped in rising blue mist from the famous river it borders. Wait. That's a little too misty, or are my eyes blurring from all that cheap local beer we drank just a few hours before? No, it's my glasses, which, lik...

In this beautiful, tiny town of Yangshou, we are staying around the corner and down the street from West St in a cute little hostel called the Sweet Hotel. West St is the 'tourist trap' of Yangshou where all the restaurants and shops are found. The city is surrounded by funky looking rock formations and mountains. It's a quieter town, with 300 0...

Hello or Ni Hai, the past week has been a bit hectic. We left Hanoi and headed to Halong Bay which is pretty spectacular. I'm really going to have to improve my vocabulary and learn more words to descibe stuff. Halong Bay is full on little Limestone islands ( about 1000) all jutting out of the sea. really serene just sailing about soaking up the...

Hi everyone, Last time I wrote we were at Lijiang, trying to decide what to do next. Well, two days after we took a 8-hours bus to Kunming, the capital of the region. Kunming is a very big city, with not many attractions for tourists, and we were there for about one morning. In this morning I went to see two pavilions recommended by the Lonely P...

Yangshuo is an eclectic mix of Chinese and Western, Old and Modern, Chilled out and Hyper. It's a weird but hugely agreeable fusion of cultures. It is famous because it is unique. Western Backpackers and wealthy tour groups enjoy it because it's relaxed and calm and comfortable. The Chinese students and tour groups come because it's quaint and f...

I had breakfast at a local café in the centre of Yangshuo this morning. Apparently this relatively small village is becoming something of a tourist hotspot- a number of foreign tour companies are based here, so there are more restaurants, t-shirt stalls and internet cafes than you would expect for somewhere of this size. That said, there are a f...

We left Yangshou on the 29th on a bus for Guilin. When we reached Guilin we caught a bus for the town of Longshen. After two hours we reached Longshen. As soon as we stepped of the bus in Longshen a lady walked up and said she had a bus leaving for Ping An so off we went. Ping An is a small village located in the Longji Rice Terraces. This is al...

Imaging how far I could get in Japan or even back home with 25 hours on a train I...well actually I didn't have a clue but I'm pretty sure it's further than the 1500km that this journey would take - a small hop on terms of China as a whole. I slept pretty well though even with the lower bunk of 3 (everyone sits on the bottom bunk during the day)...