Getting Out of the Bubble

After Yangshuo and our first of the really long train journeys - 18 hours - we arrived in Zhangjiajie in the early hours. Our first experience of a hard seat sleeper train left us all pretty exhausted but we decided to power on through to make the most of our first day in Zhangjiajie.  The girls decided to find what looked like a temple on the city map, while the boys were left to their own devices. As it turns out the supposed temple was a) at the top of an epic hill of what felt like 100's of stairs, and b) wasn't a temple. Instead of a lovely temple at the top of this hill we found a sort of memorial obelisk and a locked pagoda. Not entirely convinced it was worth all the stairs!  By this point sleep deprivation was well and truly kicking in so we had a quiet night to recharge in preparation for the main event, the Avatar Mountains, the next day.  The Avatar Mountains are what Zhangjiajie is most famous for and before the film came out the city didn't really have any W...

I have skipped out a leg of our journey when writing but purely for continuity our time in Xiaolan deserves a brief mention. In Xiaolan we stayed with Greg, our friend from training week in Beijing, and had a great time catching up with familiar faces and generally recharging. We didn't do a great deal (hence the omission from blogging) but it was really good to be able to sleep and wash our clothes and see so many people. The big bonus of being in Xiaolan was that we have now expanding our travelling party of 2 to a group of 8. The number will fluctuate as time goes on but for now its nice to be in a big group, although organisation is a lot less smooth than in our single minded duo! So now we have left Xiaolan behind and moved on to continue our journey. A 12 hour bus ride took us to Yangshuo and the hub of the a south. The 12 hour bus journey wasn't too bad itself, the beds were comfy enough and the other passengers were very friendly, but the 9 hour wait until check in at o...

Half way through our stay in Xiamen we took a day out to visit and spend a night in a Tulou in rural Fujian. Tulous - also called Hakkas after the Hakka minority they once housed - are essentially huge huts made of wood and mud which, for hundreds of years, have housed entire villages. They come in various shapes (square, oval, circle) and various sizes (from one floor to towering 7 floor structures) but no matter what they look like they are always impressive. The province of Fujian's countryside is littered with clusters of Tulous and are a popular trip for Chinese tourists to make.  We had decided to visit the Hongkeng Tulou cluster （哄坑土楼群）, mainly because my guide book recommended one of the Tulous in it for it's accomodation and English speaking owner. Booking accomodation was easy enough and the son of a family who live in the Fuyu （福楼） Tulou, Stephen, said he'd meet us at the Tulou bus stop. Perfect.  After a hair raising journey on a motorbik...