This morning both Susie and I are feeling a little concave, or is it convex.... anyway we are both starving! Our last meal seems like a lifetime ago; since the dodgy sushi we have shopped till we dropped in plastic heaven; run across Guangzhou; grabbed a salad in Starbucks; run for the busiest train in China; sat for seven and a half hours in a packed train; survived a 40 minute ride with a driver who obviously thinks he is from the Schumacher family and finally ...

Another chilled morning: tea, packing, chatting. Had a cheeky check on facebook via a 'freegate' as fb is blocked here. Most bizarre. Then a 20p bus and metro ride to Martyrs' Square to explore outdoor shops and satisfy my bag fetish! Just had to treat myself to a beautiful green rucksack...then sushi with super-strong wasabi! (Can I just put at this stage that you have Susie authoring today, I do not have said bag fetish!) Next was the metro to Haizhu to glim...

Today we decided to get up early and after a yummy breakfast of fruit with red date yoghurt and pork buns we set off to explore Guangzhou. We took the bus to the Orchid Garden and couldn't understand why we received change after trying to pay the enormous sum of 80p each that was listed on the entrance board.... We soon realised that although the park is beautiful there were no orchids!!! The wrong season.... Susie was amazed to realise that every time she walked...

Lovely lazy sleepy morning. Coffee. Chatting. Reading. Lazy. Cooked up some travel plans and Sam booked our Yongding guest house. Eventually we got dressed and got the 58 bus to go shopping. Our fellow passengers stared so long and hard at us, I began to wonder if I had accidentally put my bra on over my t-shirt. Lunch was Wasabi squid and Japanese noodles (yum yum) before the Mission to Get The Train Tickets. We walked to a ticket booth, where the Mission in...

The day started with a breakfast of steam buns and pickles chez Eva. We then had, sadly, only a few hours left to wander the magical and now crowded cobbled streets of Lijiang. We saw a baby of maybe 8 months, with split bottom pants, being hoisted over the edge of the pavement and weeing on the command of a whistle!!! (seemed slightly more like training a puppy than a baby and also a challenge to conventional wisdom in the West that a baby of that age would no...