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...

After Hangzhou,  our journey took us down South to Xiamen and the neighbouring island of Gulang Yu. The 7 hour train was relatively painless and we eventually found our hostel after taking an 100¥ taxi and navigating a warren of tiny alleyways. Xiamen Old Town Hostel is tucked away in the market backstreets of the old town in Xiamen, right in the heart of the city and proved a fantastic base for our explorations. The benefits of staying in the midst of a sprawling market are fairly obvious (easy access to food!) but the tangle of streets was confusing and we were told even locals could get lost in them! The threat of getting lost wasn't any deterrent when it came to exploring though. I think I could have spent many more hours ogling the various stalls and discovering an entirely different side to Chinese cuisine.  My favourite thing about Xiamen was, hands down, the food. Being a hot paradise by the sea meant masses of fresh seafood and tropical fruit were readily available...

After our train ride in the comfort of first claas, the first thing to hit us when getting of the train was the humidity. We knew as we headed south it was going to get hotter and more humid but I wasn't expecting it to happen quite so rapidly! This heat didn't help when we were confronted with an hour and a half queue to get a taxi. Heavy bags, humid heat and long queue are not the best combination but the wait wasn't too bad and we finally made it to our hostel at half 10 at night. Our stay at the '4 Eyes Backpackers Hostel' has been overall really positive, even if the nights have been puntuated with drunk Americans stumbling in in the early hours. It's a cute little wooden hostel up in the hills of Hangzhou. Hangzhou as a whole is very green, and our area was no exception. Surrounding us were green hills and tree lined avenues; a welcome change from the highrise apartments of Suzhou and Shanghai. Right next door, nestled amongst the trees, was a seemingly fl...

This week we have said our goodbyes to friends and places in Suzhou and started on our grand adventure across China. For the next 2ish months we will be living out of backpacks (that weigh almost as much as us) and soaking up as much of China as time - and money - will allow. For the next week and a half, we are winding our way down to Guangzhou to meet friends and then spending July travelling up to Beijing via what we've (rather arbitrarily) decided are China's highlights. Once we hit Guangzhou our plans become a little hazy, but until then Jenny and I have a plan! Presented in the least elegant way our plan is: Shanghai - Hangzhou - Xiamen & Guang Yu - Fujian Tulou - Guangzhou. Look it up on a map, it's not a bad start to an adventure at all! But for now our journey starts in China's most metropolitan city, Shanghai. This was a gentle easing into our journey; we'd been to Shanghai before and sort of had a feel for the city, but don't think that meant ...