(Day 116 on the road)After my recovery, I left for the Tiger Leaping Gorge, still feeling a little week after having eaten very little for a week. However, my timing to trek the gorge turned out to be just perfect! During my stay in Lijiang I had seen many people leaving for the gorge only to return back to Lijiang as the trek was closed or even the road to it was shut so the buses had to turn around. As this is rainy season, it does really rain frequently, resulting in landslides on the road and the trek. Also, as we learnt, a foreigner had died just two days ago on the hike, resulting in the closure of the High Road, as it is called. When I arrived at the starting point of the path, ... read more

(Day 108 on the road)22 hours on the train and a few instant noodle-pots later ("Have instant noodles, will travel" as Karen called it) I arrived in Kunming. I also managed to loose another hat on the train, the 4th one since I set off for this trip, perfect Ben. On the plus side, the Lonely Planet had said the trip from Guilin to Kunming was 26 hours, so I was positively surprised when the train pulled into Kunming station after only 22h. What is strange about these night trains is that all the Chinese travellers sleep fully dressed. In Russia and Mongolia, people would go through proper preparations to go to bed, i.e. changing into their pyjamas and so on before going to bed. In China, the people just flop on their bunks, not much ... read more

(Day 101 on the road)An overnight train ride from the karst peaks of Zhangjiajie away lies a different world altogether, the rice terraces of Longji (The "Dragons's Backbone"). After a stopover in Guilin to visit the local PSB-office to apply for a visa extension for me (more on that later on, see next blog-entry), backing up our pictures and buying a camera battery for Karen, we headed to the village Longsheng for the night. The next day we took the bus towards Ping'an, a well established tourist-town who sees the majority of visitors that come to the area to see the amazing rice terraces. After checking our very extremely undetailed map ("Not to scale" - nice), we nevertheless decided to get off the bus about halfway to Ping'an, really in the middle of nowhere. And this ... read more

(Day 90 on the road)From Chongqing, I headed for a trip on the Yangtze River and through the famous Three Gorges. At 6300km, the Yangtze is the third longest river in the world (after the Amazon and the Nile), and the longest in Asia. It starts in the Tibetan mountains and runs all the way to Shanghai and into the East China Sea. Most tourist cruise the Yangtze starting in Chongqing and ending in Yichang, which is the section that runs through the Three Gorges. As the region around Chongqing was badly hit by the recent earthquake in China, there weren't many tourists in the area, and there was only one boat running per day, which didn't leave from Chongqing but about three bus-hours further downstream. Harriet had made it back from her party on the ... read more

(Day 85 on the road)Back from trekking on Hua Shan, the one thing most tourist come to Xi'an for is of course the world famous Terracotta Warriors. I am not quite sure if it really the eighth wonder of the world, as many of the information signs on the actual site wanted us to believe, but it sure was an impressive sight! Just standing in the three pits that are open to visitors and looking at the thousands of warriors and horses that have been standing there for over 2000 years guarding the area and the tomb of the emperor that had the army built left a lasting impression. On the way out however you are routed through a very long stretch of souvenir and food shops/ stalls, which was very tedious and ruined the whole ... read more