Hello! Is it Li you're looking for? After the bright lights of several big cities in China, it was time for a change of pace, so we headed for Yangshuo, a small town on the banks of the Li River in the south of the country. Despite the tourist dominated town centre, it wasn't hard to escape the busy main streets and head into the countryside. For the princely sum of two pounds, we hired a couple of sturdy looking mountain bikes for the day and armed with a (rubbish) map headed for some of the local sites. Managing to go in completely the opposite direction from that which we intended turned out to be a perfect mistake. The surrounding scenery of karst peaks and paddy fields was an almost perfect representation of what rural China ... read more

One of our favourite names from the Summer Palace. They're certainly imaginative when it comes to naming temples here but then I suppose having so many you have to get creative. Although it should be pointed out that on occasion the names are really quite basically descriptive. Take "The Animal Killing Pavilion" at the Temple of Heaven for example. Not mincing their words, just their livestock. You get to your limit of temples quite quickly, even with a string of funny names to keep you amused. Possibly the best sign was to be found on the barriers surrounding some statues at the Summer Palace: "Help protect our Cultural relics. Help protect our railings" We reckon we've tried quite a variety of transport options on the trip so far and at the Summer Palace we added one ... read more

Just one of the supremely cheesy and almost propaganda-like lines used to link together the acrobatics show we went to see the other night. Apart from sniggering at the subtitles the performance was pretty amazing - no-one should be able to bend in those ways. And getting 12 people on one bicycle has to be seen to be believed. We arrived in Beijing on Saturday and despite the scale of the city managed to find ourselves in a really cosy little neighbourhood which is fantastic to stroll around (if you can avoid the thousands of bricklayers currently resurfacing the alleys, the bicycles carrying entire shops and the rickshaws which take no heed of pedestrians). When we say we found ourselves here, we really mean that a taxi driver managed to quiz enough locals to get some ... read more

We left Ekaterinburg with heavy hearts. No, wait, heavy bags. To say we weren't sad to leave would be an understatement. To say we were looking forward to sixty hours on a train would be a lie. However, as it turns out, the carriage was full of friendlier faces, and vitally, windows that opened. We shared our cabin with a young Russian called Sasha who took great delight in spraying his new waterpistol at everything and anything the train trundled past. An older Sasha who spoke English acted as tour guide as we clocked up the miles through the improving scenery of the Russian taiga. Something that definitely wasn't improving was the mood of the provodnitsas, who were thoroughly unimpressed with our explanation of carolyn's missing ticket stub. One of the equally enthusiastic railway staff had ... read more