Having arrived in China we quickly discovered that our suspicions were confirmed, Facebook, Blogger and any other social network-style websites are banned by the government. Weird bunch of commies. So forgive me if this post is lacking on details, as it is going to cover our whole six weeks in China.
The first stop was Beijing: really expensive and we all got ill... so we started off pretty badly and were all a bit fed up. Had a couple of good nights out though. Whilst here we saw The Great Wall, which was without a doubt one of the highlights of the trip so far in terms of the sights, also to get up and down we took and roller-coaster cart... great fun. We finished up in Beijing by exploring the markets and eating weird things like scorpions and other creepy crawleys.
Next we ventured to Xi'an for the Terracotta Warriors, but having checked in to a hostel with a lively bar and met some fun people it took eight days before we saw the Warriors (Pete and Tino still decided not to see it), these eight days were a bit of a blur. We planned to leave Xi'an for Chengdu to see pandas but left it for another day as we had hangovers, turns out someone was looking down on us, because the train we had booked had fallen off a bridge which had been hit by a landslide. Hhmm, we decided not to attempt fate and chose to take Chengdu off the list of things to see.
We got a train to Yichang instead with our new best buddies: Jay and Neil from Kent who we will be travelling with now for the best part of Southeast Asia. We got there late at night to the worse city we've seen so far and were scared shitless when our taxi dropped us off at a dark alley to where our hostel was supposed to be. It turned out to be the right place and we checked in. The next day we walked around trying to find where to get a boat to see the Three Gorges River but by the time we found it was getting dark so decided against it.
Next stop was Yangshuo via Guilin. We took a river cruise to travel between the two places which was pretty and looked a lot like Jurassic Park. Luckily no dinosaurs were there. We had booked four nights in Yangshuo but it turned into a twenty day stay. Yangshuo was definitely the highlight of China for us, a beautiful town surrounded by karst peaks with plenty to do which could be compared with Queenstown, or possibly even Magaluf. Unfortunately due to the party scene we did not do a massive amount of activities, but we made good friends with the hostel owners and pretty much took over the place, in particular the rooftop bar. We were also asked to organise a beach party which attracted a good two or three-hundred guests.
We finally left Yangshuo for Vietnam to get to some good weather and cheaper prices. Our six is now seven as we are being accompanied by a crazy Irishman named Neal. China was fun, but we were glad we cut down the three months we had planned there down to six weeks: not everywhere in China was our cup of tea.
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