The time has come and after 5 weeks we have reached the end of our time in China! For our last stop on our adventure here, we chose to head to the Yuanyang rice terraces in South Yunnan, just a few hours from the Vietnam border. Although we had seen great rice terraces a few weeks ago in Guilin, we had heard that Yuanyang was extra special and somewhere we should not miss. Plus it was on the way to Hekou, the town on the Chinese side of the border crossing to 'Nam that we needed to leave from, so a handy stop over. The bus was supposed to take 6 hours from Kunming to Xinjie, the old town of Yuanyang and the starting point of the rice terraces, but as usual took longer and after ... read more

The Yunnan province was to be the last province in China we would visit but for the longest amount of time and the one which we had heard so many great things about, so our expectations for the area were high. Our first stop was the old Naxi town of Lijiang, where we arrived after a quick flight from Chengdu. LiJiang had been home to the 300,000 odd Naxi minority for the last 1,400yrs and they originally decended from the Tibetian Qiang tribes. What we found so strange and endearing about this minority (especially Vic’s) is that the women rule the roost in every way, I mean they become the sole owner of any child they produce and if the decide to kick the man out they retain all property and rights. We had wanted to ... read more

After our interesting train journey from Xi'an we finally arrived in Chengdu 18 hours later, which is in South-West China in the Sichuan province, and took the metro to our home for the next 3 nights, Mix hostel. We liked it straight away as the staff were super friendly and it had a tropical feel to it, with indoor plants and an open air roof top which was cool. We decided to have a chilled out day as we were quite tired and spent the afternoon resting and planning our next few days in this region, before meeting up with Simon from S.A and checking out the Wide Lane area of the city. Lined with cute restaurants and shops, it was quite touristy but really nice so we wandered through the streets there for a while ... read more

After an 8 hour restless train journey from Datong, we arrived into Pingyao at 1am. Our hostel pick up which was promised wasn’t there to meet us at the station, so we jumped in a taxi and rattled down the quiet dark streets into the old walled city. Once at our hostel we were shown to our room, which was set around a quaint courtyard and very original with high ceilings, stain-glassed windows, large wooden furniture and an oversized ‘bed’ built onto a big concrete platform – this was our first glance into this traditional town. We were shattered and even though it was cold and the electric blanket we excitedly found wasn’t working, we fell asleep quickly. The next morning we had a well-earned lay in until 10am, discovered we had both caught a cold ... read more

It was always going to be hard to follow up on such an amazing day at The Great Wall, but we had heard so much about the Forbidden City in Beijing we had to visit it and see for ourselves what all the fuss was about. With blue skies and sunshine once again, we walked there via Tian'amen Square, which for such an open space has quite a serious mood and Soviet influences were still clearly present in the guise of guards everywhere and a silent but obvious tension, but many say that China still carries this under-current and this is one of the places it is most seen. We carried on walking until we finally reached the entrance to The Forbidden City, also known as The Palace Museum. The Forbidden City is a vast walled ... read more