Hi all, We didn't sleep too well last night-there is a snorer in our room (and it isn't Neil). We woke about 8am so get breakfast from the local street sellers and buy lunch for the day trip. We also bought our train tickets for Chengdu. I forgot my passport :( so once the woman had worked out what train we wanted when, (took a while with the language barrier) she sent us away to get my passport. It was only a 5 minute walk back to the hostel but it was a pain as we only had a little while before our tour started and because we then had to go through the process again with this woman.... sorry Neil :-( We met the rest of our minibus for our tour to the TCA of ... read more

Hi all, Another restful day in the city, we had another lie-in as we will be back to noisy, no privacy/dorms again from tonight. We had pastries for breakfast again, then after checking out at noon, we headed to East Nanjing road for window shopping. We also bought some more honey glazed pork jerky-it's so amazing!!! We walked back to the hostel through the backstreets, we came across some more tiny puppies for sale, insects for sale, a rude woman who wouldn't sell us walnuts :( and the general chaos of Chinese driving. After eating lunch at Kirkwood again, we spent a chilled afternoon in the hostel common area. Our train is at 18.55pm to Xi'an, where we have a hostel booked for two nights. We hope to see the Terracotta Army there. That's all for ... read more

Hello Followers, So we had an early wake up for Shanghai arrival this morning, the Chinese way, is blearing music into your cabin an hour before arriving, nice!! But finally arrived in Shanghai. We took the metro from the station to the nearest stop to our hostel, it only took 20 minutes at about 33p ticket. We dropped our bags off at the hostel into storage as it was still only 8.30am. The hostel is Ming town International-looks ok so far. We headed straight to East Nanjing Road- all the super retail stores are here, and if you walk to the east end you can look out over the Huangpu River to the sky scrapers in the Bund. After this we went to the Shanghai Confucian Temple. This was small and didn't have detailed English translations ... read more

Hi All, Today we woke early and headed to the Forbidden City thinking that with the early start we would beat the cues.....NOPE!!! Was mental- so busy. We walked all the way to the entrance before being told the ticket office was the other side of the square (cost us 30 mins cueing!!!) Once inside it was apparent how beautiful the place was (well it was for Emperors and Empresses) the buildings are amazing and well worth seeing. Hope our photos do it justice. We were 2 of 10 other white people we saw all day. After the Forbidden City, which was 3 hours of walking around, we headed to the Jingshan park which was amazing!!! There were loads of locals playing music or dancing, was good to see so many people doing things. We walked ... read more

Hi Followers, We stepped off the overnight sleeper train at 11.40am, arriving in Beijing!! As we were at the train station we queued up to book out overnight train to Shanghai for monday (12 hours: £61 each). By the time we got off the metro and found our hostel it was 2.30pm. We asked two Chinese girls who didn't speak English where our hostel was, so they kindly started google mapping it for us, when i looked up and realised we were standing right under the Leo Hostel sign-a little embarrassing-Neil knew it was around the area we just couldn't see for looking... We wanted to book the Great Wall of China up as soon as we arrived, as there weren't enough people signed up to the section of the Great Wall we wanted to go ... read more