We arrived in Beijing at about 9am and after mooching about and ignoring the non official scouts trying to charge ¥150 to get to our hostel, we joined the taxi queue got a taxi who took us through beijings packed wide streets to our hostel, a good 45 minute drive away. The hostel had two warrior statues like the terra cotta ones at the door, and above a big blinking sign 'Happy Dragon Inn'. Walking in the girls spoke excellent English and uograded Jen and I fo...

Refreshed (ish) from a night in the hostel (tho again I couldn't sleep, that might have had something to do with the Israeli guy in the next bunk. We headed out early on our day of adventure. First stop, the train ticket office where they told us they only did soft sleepers as the hard were sold out and they were more expensive 440yuan. Next to the bus station where the tickets were about 280 but we couldn't leave that day, then to the train station where we e...

I was up for ages that night, after being kept awoken by the family I couldn't switch my brain off and just kept thinking about anything and everything, a lot of it was about missing David and wishing he was there for a kiss and a cuddle. I did eventually pass out maybe around 3/4ish and was awoken by the clambour of people moving about to wash and have breakfast about 7.30am. After A while, I got up and had a cigarette then lied down again until 10ish when i...

Not such a great day. Jen and I got up about 1pm, went out to get some lunch, came back and watched a movie then went cormorant fishing. The fishing bit was quite cool, we went out on a little boat and followed this guy in a small boat with cormorants attached to it on string, they were just visible under the lone hanging light at the head of the boat. When they saw something they would dive below the water, come up with a fish and the boatman would pull th...

We got up early as we had booked ourselves on a Li river cruise up to Langdi, where we were to get the bus back. They came to collect us for the short ride to the pier and got on a small boat with a lower deck with seating and an upper deck without (unless you paid extra to sit up there, but you could stand) We pulled out and it was a fairly uninspiring first hour on the boat before the beautiful hills started to come into view and we moved to stand upstairs (a...