KathandJane

From Guilin we rode down to Yangshou via Xingping a lovely little town set between the river and some massive karst hills. Most people visit Xingping in a day, Katherine and I thought that we would stay here for 3 as the hostel was cheap and there were some pretty cheap noddle places next door, plus the scenery was amazing. We did this lovely walk to a fishing village, where we didn't actually see any fisherman (i think we got lost) but walked through lots of orchards in which Katherine was pretty keen to steal some fruit but the imprisonment signs put her off. Got a bamboo boat (when a local walks past you the just say "bamboo" to you, which means would you like a ride on a bamboo boat) but a massive rip off, ... read more

So for some reason China let us back into the Mainland...lucky us. Anyway getting out of Hong Kong was a bit of a nightmare, Hong Kong is not really made for bikes and neither is their public transport so had to take a ferry and a train but eventually made it and got the biking trip back on track. The first thing that we noticed about Hainan was the HEAT, man it was hot. After getting dumped by the train 25km from Haikou (the capital) we road into town and by the time we arrived we were both in full body sweats even though it was completely flat and we were taking it pretty slowly as we weren't entirely sure where the hostel was. And to make matters worst, when we turned up there were these ... read more

Vietnam, the country we weren't supposed to go to..... After taking a good couple of hours to cross the boarder and make it into Vietnam, we realised that we had no maps, guide books, money or language. Good start. After making train noises we finally worked out the way to the train station (a mixture of Katherine's knee and too much traffic going to Hanoi) where we booked our overnight ticket. Last time i caught this train with Laura 3 years ago, we didn't get any sleep even though we got the soft sleeper option so this time we thought that we would save money and go for the soft seat because we weren't going to get any sleep at any rate. It wasn't actually too bad, very much like an plane seat, but we got ... read more

After the tour company messed up our train tickets we ended up training across china for 4 days before finally making it to our destination, which would have been quicker to just take a bus but know one would let us. Anyway on the morning of the first we got on our train heading for Xi'an. Our lovely guide was panicing that we were going to miss the train, so we had to turn up to the train station over an hour early, which including a little bit of rally driving through Lhasa, alittle bit scary when there had been fresh snow over night. Made it safely and then getting through security was interesting, they wanted us to take the wheels off our bikes, which makes it pretty hard to carry all our stuff so we ... read more

So after getting back from Everest we tried to get our China/Tibet visa, not that hard but since we didn't want to pay the extra US$100 or so each it took forever, hense the held hostage title. For the first few days we primarily slept, we were surprisingly tired. Then the Kathmandu mountain film festival was on and since the tickets were Rs30 (70cents) for each movie, we watched a lot of movies, some cool and some not so cool. But saw a great movie about the New Zealand falcon, which was set just out of Dunedin which made both of us pretty home sick. Also watched a few mountain climbing and ski descents as well as rockclimbing and movies about everest, most of which made Katherine want to go climbing and me realise that i'm ... read more