Our arrival in Hong Kong yesterday left everyone absolutely exhausted. The last train journey turned out to be the most rickety, with screaming babies, snoring old men and a driver with a tendency to ring the horn in the middle of the night, for no apparent reason. Still, we had another fairly long journey before we actually got into the city - we landed in Shenzen then had to make our way through immigration, which was odd. Felt more like making our way through ...

Today was Liam's birthday, the big 2-2, but not particularly eventful unfortunately. We were scheduled to spend the day travelling back to Guilin to pick up our rucksacks, via various modes of transport, followed by another overnight train to Hong Kong. The weather had cleared up quite significantly overnight, which meant that during breakfast we could see right across the valley, and realised that actually we were very high up! A few of us left earlier than the...

Yesterday morning we had to get up pretty early for our transfer to Guilin by public bus. It took 2 buses to get to the nearest town with a railway station - where we left our big rucksacks in a storage centre for a couple of days while we went to the Longji Rice Terraces. It took another couple of bus journeys through the hairpin bends to get to our destination, and even then it took another 40 minute walk with our daysacks up the hills to get to our hostel in t...

Sorry we haven't updated in a while, these past 10 days have been busy busy busy, so today we're catching up with the blog & photos so stay tuned. Yesterday afternoon, carrying on from our last blog entry, we made the most of our last day in Yangshuo town central, despite the rain, shopping along the market stalls and whiling away the afternoon in our temporary home that was MC Blues. We discovered a bar which sold apple crumble (!!!) aswell, not a patch o...

We were troopers this morning and got up at 5am for our impending balloon ride! Looking at the sky it didn't seem likely it would be a go-ahead, as it was really misty making the visibility poor, but the woman in charge seemed to think it was fine, so we handed over our money and dragged our tired selves onto the mini bus. Bobo came along too with Lucy and Christina so we were all really excited on the way! Suddenly we saw a burst of fire on the road in front of ...