The plan for today is to take a river cruise for around 40 miles along the Li River to the town of Yangshuo - known for even better scenery than Guilin, as well as being regarded as one of the best rock climbing spots in Asia. It transpires that a boat has departed Guilin half-full. Never seeing an opportunity pass by, our tour guide arranges with the captain to get our group on the half-full boat - with the fact that the boat is moving on the water apparently...

A slight misunderstanding with a bus driver very nearly results in our bags being driven to Xi'an airport without us, but fortunately with a bit of shouting and pointing disaster is averted. The journey is far less fraught than the one that brought us into Xi'an and we arrive at the airport in good time. The plane descends into Guilin over paddy fields and the distinctive 'karst' limestone peaks for which this area of southern China is so well renowned. We dep...

In a last minute change of plan today we're transferred onto the 'foreign' coach - made up of a smaller group, hopefully with better timekeeping than yesterday's. The first stop is at Banpo Neolithic Village, or it would be if the road wasn't being rebuilt. So we stop in one of Xi'an's unsightly suburbs and walk a short distance to the Museum, built from Jade stone. Inside the museum lies the site of a massive archaeological dig of the ancient village, which d...

Our first Chinese bus tour of the trip is taking us to Mount Hua. Billed in the brochure as 'one of the five most famous mountains in China,' it has been a spiritual home of Taoism for over two thousand years. First, however, we have a bus ride to enjoy. The coach is full, exclusively with eager Chinese tourists, fascinated by the two white men gatecrashing the party. Intrigued by two people with the same colour hair and roughly the same height, multiple memb...

We departed Beijing this morning to arrive in Xi'an (pronounced she-ann), a surprisingly large town of eight million people located in China's North, most notable for being the home of the Terracotta Warriors, as well as having being the end of the Silk Route in the middle part of the last millennium. We hop into a cab and "Thud!" as the taxi driver proceeds to reverse hard into the kerb. The driver, a spotty man in his early 20s, quickly corrects, d...