UNEXPECTED DEVELOPMENTS

After a rather supreme time in North Korea, we crossed back over the border to China by bus and I continued with some of my tour pals on a long couple of train rides back to Beijing - complete with North Korean entry and exit stamps in my passport. I spent a few days in Beijing sorting out some random bits and generally faffing around...then I headed down to Xian.

XIAN CITY
 

Xian is another massive Chinese city. The central part of the city is surrounded by this big square city wall. At first, I thought this was the extent of the city, but infact it does sprawl endlessley in all directions for at least an hours driving as you make your way out of the city. Unfortunately, due to the intense development going on here, the city is pretty much permanently under a state of smog.

That said, it's still a cool city to explore around, with some very Chinese feeling market places and side streets. The main reason people come here is because its nearby to the 'Terracotta Warriors" tourist sight. Look it up if you don't already know what it is. For whatever reason, I ended up not actually going to see this ancient site, something that I almost regret not doing....

However, ticking off expensive tourist traps isn't really my thing anyway. However, one of the things I love about China is how I found it such a great place for getting yourself into totally surprising and otherwise un-planned for events.

This led me to honour China with the nick name of "The Land of Unexpected Developments". What follows is one good example of this.

LAOWAI FREE LUNCH

I'd got talking to this older Canadian guy (Marco) at the tail end of a pretty intense pub session with the tour guide who'd been with us in NK. At some point, Marco told me he was going to a Chinese food tasting session the following day and that it was free. I agreed, but then completely forgot about this.

Anyway, the next morning I was rudely awaken by Marco asking if I was ready to go yet?! I'd obviously told him where I was staying and he was determined enough to make his way into my dorm to fetch me...I thought I may aswell see what this was all about!

We ended up at this ridiculously massive, super-posh hotel. Infact, it wasn't a hotel, it was some kind of ultra-restaurant for the mega rich, with lots of suited guys enthusiastically greeting us. I was a bit worried but this was some sort of scam and we would have to pay through the nose just for setting foot in this place, but we got clarification early on that everything was indeed going to be completely free.

We eventually worked out that what was going on was that this was a new up and coming mega restaurant, and they wanted to take some pictures of "laowai's" (Chinese word for foreigners) eating there and having a good time. I felt pretty out of place there, showing up with a hangover in my shabby hoody and trainers, but the managers and film crew didn't seem bothered by that in the slightest so I just went with.

They took hundreds of pictures and videos of us sitting/walking around and eating the food. They made us do a few shots multiple times, with instructions like..."please walk into the dining area and look around, look HAPPY! look SURPRISED! ". While they took pictures of us the whole time.

We were then presented with an epic 'emperors menu' of 11 different specially crafted dishes, based on the selection of an ancient legendary emperor. Each meal was proceeded by an elaborate opening ceremony, beginning with a guy dressed in traditional robes reciting a Chinese speech. This place was so posh that each person gets their own individual table and waitress to serve them. I took a video of one of the opening speeches, that they rehearsed several times over, as part of the mega video collection available at the bottom of the home page.

Now for reasons I can't quite understand why, my ability to use chopsticks actually seemed to decrease the longer I spent in China. At some point, the serving staff noticed my incompetence at picking up the food effectively, and they set up a whole mini-ceremony, with another speech and everyone lining up in order for me to presented with. . . . . . . . . . . . . .a fork.

The food was really amazing, as you'd expect. We did stay in this place for pretty much the whole day, and I'm pretty sure they got their money's worth in terms of photos of us two munching away. Would quite like to see what they actually use the pics for, if they do at all!

Who said there's no such thing as a free lunch?

CHINESE NIGHTCLUBBING

After finishing in Xian in far more of a rush than I would have preferred, I ended up in the smaller but still massive city of Chengdu. This was my favourite big city in China. It seemed smaller and more chilled out than some of the other monstrously large cities I spent time in China. Despite this being a "small" and feeling relatively chilled out, it's still about the same size as London!

In Chengdu I got to discover something about the Chinese mainstream night-clubbing scene. They do things a bit differently over there! I ended up at a few clubs while in China, and they all exhibited the following features:

- Completely packed with people. Free entry and use of cloakroom. Crazy amounts of lights and lasers bring the place to life very effectively.

 - People stand in groups round a table. The dancefloor is normally a small stage. So if you want to go and dance, you have to go up and do your thing in front of everyone in the club! Felt a bit awkward at first...but loved it soon enough. Let's face it, all eyes are on you anyway as the only foreigners in the club so may aswell get up there and take advantage of it!

- Chinese clubbers are extremely freindly. We were rarely given an opportunity to buy our own drinks. From the second we step in the place, people are greeting us and sharing their drinks with us.

- The music is actually pretty GOOD. Like dirty electro-house music. I even caught them playing a few artists I recognise from back home (e.g. Far Too Loud, Feed Me etc.).

- Every hour or so, the music will be replaced with some kind of "show". This is normally pretty entertaining. I saw various shows ranging from a boyband getting up on stage, scantily clad dancers, obscure re-enactments of some chinese crazyness to the scenes you see on your right!

- In this particular show they had a blow up nurse doll on stage and were playing a game where volunteers had to sit with a banana between their legs. Another volunteer would then have to eat the banana from between their legs. Those that managed it won a phone! They also chucked out condoms out from the stage to everyone. We actually found these condoms to be of poor quality, but hey the whole thing was pretty memorable!

- As "Laowai's" (foreigners) we were typically treated like celebrities or something...an almost overwhelmingly freindly vibe from the other club goers. Everytime I went clubbing we were the only Laowai's in the club, and it would have been rude to turn down all the drinks that were bought for us!

I  should add that we only visited the standard, mainstream types of club...the Chinese equivalent of "Oceana" in the UK or something like that. Despite this, I found the quality of entertainment and the general vibe much better than what you'd find in the UK if you wander into any random city center nightclub. DJ's doing proper sets (interspersed with often hilarious shows) and not allowing things to descend too far into thoughtless, cringey, cheesy chart music oblivion! Due to the extra-freindly vibe going on, would be extremely easy to pick up Chinese girls at these places, if you're into that sort of thing! 

CHENGDU TRIO

It was in Chengdu that I teamed up with two other guys I met who were staying in the same dorm room as me. Jonathon (from France), and Salvi (from Switzerland). We started off going to see a Giant Buddah, and ended up spending over a week travelling around various other places and checking out the Chinese countryside.

The Leshan Buddah, as you can see to your right, is the largest buddah in the whole world. It really is something to behold! This picture doesn't do justice to the scale of the thing, but check out the pictures in the gallery below to get an idea of the mammoth scale of this huge buddah One of it's toes is about as a big as a person!

It was while travelling around these guys that I really started to appreciate that a lot of the fun in China is to be had in the countryside. As with many countries, I think it's only when you get out of the cities that you start to appreciate the culture of a country and start to experience the freindly nature of the people living there.

It's kind of ironic, because people outside of the cities tend to know the least amount of English to help you out with. Despite this, their eagerness to help in anyway they can ends up being way more useful than those living in cities who often know a bit of English but have seen way too many lost and confused tourists to have much patience with!

Another point is that I think to get the most out of a place like China, you really should team up with some other people! As well as having some other people to discuss the weird and wacky stuff you will inevitably come across, China can often be a very confusing and sometimes even intimidating place to be wandering around the place, using public transport etc.

When you are in a little group or even just with a partner, it gives you a much stronger sense of purpose and also it's easier to absolve some responsibility for figuring out what you should do and how to do it... All of a sudden, it doesn't matter so much if you don't know which bus to catch, if you don't know where you will be sleeping that night, or if you end up stranded without having a clue where you actually are. It doesn't really matter what happens because you've got some people you can appreciate the random nature of China with, and work together with in figuring out the next part of the trip.

I also found that in our little group of three, we tended to attract a lot of attention, people wanting to talk to us etc... and the vaguely planned nature of our journeying resulted in many unexpected developments which are what I feel are really the essence of how to have some truly memorable travelling.

CHENGDU CATWALK STYLE

One of the more surreal experiences we had was while going for a walk in a local park in Chengdu. Expecting a peaceful break from the hustle and bustle of the rest of the city, this park was like nothing i'd ever seen before! The place was packed and there were little speaker systems and people dancing, singing, doing tai-chi etc. all over the place.

Perhaps most surprising was something we came across in the square in the middle of the park - a red carpet layed out, music playing and people using the red carpet to strut their undeniably Chinese style.

The catwalk was attracting the full spectrum of people demonstrating their stuff, from local fashionista's, to children, to old people. It was extremely funny and entertaining to watch all these people proudly showing off their various comic catwalk routines on the red carpet!

We were invited to follow suit, which I kind of regret not doing now, but we had already become the subject of more attention than we really knew how to handle. This joker guy (pictured on the left hand side of the picture) had started communicating with us by writing words on the floor with a water stick (kind of like a big pipette, which you could use to draw lines of water on the floor - yes it does sound strange!).

After somehow managing to work out our nationalities via his water stick floor drawing method, we soon had a big crowd of people congregating around us, some of who could speak some broken English, and generally they were very curious an interested in what the hell we were up to there, taking photo's with us, getting our signatures and all of that stuff!

This was one of many entertaining and often pretty inexplicable scenes that led me to have such a good time in the city of Chengdu. Was kind of an odd situation, going to a place as a tourist to go and see things and take pictures, but ending up treated as if we were some kind of celebrities!

WE DON'T TAKE KINDLY TO YOUR TYPE ROUND 'ERE

After getting talking to a guy in a hostel we were staying at, we managed to swindle free entrance to go and see the panda bear research base in Chengdu.

These are definately rather endearing and humorous creatures to watch. They spend most of their time sleeping. If you do catch them moving about, they will normally be happily chomping on some bamboo shoots.

Panda's are the Chinese national treasure and they hold them with very high regard and respect....though I was still a bit disappointed at the size of the enclosures, which (considering the massive size of the entire research complex), are a bit on the small side.

That said, these guys are doing important work for this critically endangered species. It was interesting talking to the Puerto Rican guy who got us inside the place about his work researching the Panda's and trying to his best to encourage them to shag each other. Despite their cute looks I did meet another guy in Vietnam that had worked with the panda's here and got attacked by one!

Perhaps the panda was just venting his frustration with constantly being egged on to reproduce all the time, can't you just leave me alone? what is this modern obsession with everyone having to hump each other all the time anyway? What happened to just having a quiet night in with some nice bamboo to munch on?

We did also get to see some baby ones too, a rare sight and they are also understandably cute.

I was particularly enamoured by the red panda's (firefoxes) which are almost as endangered as the giant version. Apparantly these are actually the 'original' panda's (hence the name of giant panda for the creature one commonly associates with panda).

The red panda's were actually able to climb out of their enclosure and come and hang around with us human beings - to the point that we could get right near them and take close up pics and stroke them.

At first I wasn't too sure about this, with a little crowd of people surrounding the little mateys, but it soon became clear that they were just out for scraps of food the tourists give them (despite the signs urging otherwise out of respect for not ruining their carefully tuned diet).

They were comfortable around people though and perfectly capable of holding their own or getting away if they wanted to.

Warning signs around the place pointed out that the red panda's are 'somewhat fierce' and that several visitors had been attacked by them, so basically don't get too up in their face or you will get what you deserve!

Well, there's not much more to say here - there were a load of panda's and they are funny to look at. If you wanna see more pics of these interesting fella's check out the gallery pics at the bottom of the page!

LIJIANG
 

Our next stop was the old traditional Chinese town of Lijiang. We arrived here around 2am, with no place booked to stay and spent a good couple of hours getting rejected by taxi's who couldn't understand where we wanted to go, and getting driven around the place by confused drivers. We ended up stranded roughly in the area where we wanted to be, with no place to stay. I think around 5am after knocking on various doors and waking up several people, we managed to find a somehwere that would put us up for the night . We ended up sleeping with the three of us guys in one bed. How romantic.

Lijiang was a really nice little place to visit if you want get a real feel for that traditional Chinese vibe. The food was pretty amazing, my favourite being the BBQ's yak meat which is a regional speciality.

We ended up staying a couple of nights in a nice traditional style guesthouse with a courtyard and chickens and whatnot. I'd recommend visiting, but it doesn't have much staying appeal. It's pretty geared up for tourists (albeit almost entirely Chinese) so stuff is more expensive than average for China, and also it's just not a big place so you can see most of it in a couple of days max.

We came across all manner of charming things in this little town. There is a nice dragon park though (as with most things with China) there is an entrance fee which we suspected was significantly higher for non Chinese. Though we did manage to circumvent this fee by crawling through some undergrowth to get in there.
 

We met a load of other travellers here, seemed to be a bit of a hub for those wanting to get a bit deeper into the Chinese countryside, so we met up with various outdoorspeople, ramblers and mountain climbing folk.

I also vaguely remember getting involved with in a bit of a jamming session with guitars and bongo drums with some of the locals in a back street bar, it as a really good evening even though I don't remember that much of it.

TIGER LEAPING GORGE

The Tiger Leaping Gorge is a massive canyon in the rural Chinese countryside and was one of the main reasons we had been working our way in this direction. It involves a two day long fairly intense hike with a stop off at one of the guesthouses located around half way along the gorge.

It really is something to behold! There are huge mountains towering over you as you make your way up and along the gorge. I would say it's probably not for the faint hearted -  aswell as a pretty arduous uphill path for a large portion of it, there are many sections that if you so much as make a wrong step or slip up you will fall to your certain doom. Apparantly trekkers have died by getting stuck up around here from time to time so I would recommend going with some other people.

There are a load of pics here so i'm going to have to break up my flow a little bit - the text continues so SCROLL DOWN!

We came across some funny characters on this long path, including the guy pictured to the right who was collecting honey from a nest of bees with his bear hands! He wasn't bothered in the slightest by all the bees buzzing around and certainly couldn't be bothered to don the full bee hunter astronaut suit that his European counterparts would surely be wearing while doing the same job.

This guys wife was selling big bags of 'marijuana' and pipes to smoke it in at a makeshift cafe someway up the gorge. This was a nice touch but unfortunately it was the male plant so although it was very cheap, it didn't have a significant effect. This was probably for the best, as we had a pretty strict deadline to make which was to get to the halfway point before it got dark) otherwise we'd end up stranded on the side of a mountain.

After a totally exhausting first day, we found the guesthouse and had a deservedly massive meal. We met some travellers from the Faroe islands who were a good laugh. I had to admit, i'd never even heard of the Faroe islands before this point.

The next day, we made our way down into the gorge itself - it was incredibly steep and involved this ladder in the picture. Trust me, it's a lot further down than it looks in the photo! I used to be not bothered at all about heights, when I was a little'un I was perfectly happy building towering treehouses and whatnot but while on this ladder, which has no kind of safety rope, I found myself starting to shake involuntarily (with a bag of weed clenched between my teeth) because I was so totally shit scared!

It takes about an hour and a half or so to work ones way down to the bottom of the gorge, but it's well worth it (and the ridiculous steep  trek back up afterwards!). There is an awesomely huge torrent of white water tearing through the rocks down here. As usual the pictures don't do it justice, although the video footage does show this a lot better (check the bottom of the home page).

I guess the only slightly annoying thing about this is that at key points along the path there are locals hanging around asking you for money to take pictures. They ask the equivalent of a quid or so which is fine for the first couple of times but gets annoying and did lead to my companions to very un-britishly tell them where to stick it at some points!

Overall, this was a totally awesome trek - easily the best trekking that I've done...not that I've done that much in fairness, but if you do want to go on a mountainous adventure that doesn't require a load of equipment and training, you can't go far wrong at the Tiger Leaping  Gorge, which must be one of the most beautifullest places to go in China.

From the gorge you can continue trekking to a load more other places, including the nearby Shangri-la which is apparantly also amazing, but which was a lot higher up and really cold at this time of year.  Legend has it that a tiger once leaped between some rocks at the bottom of this gorge, check out the extra pics in the gallery below and try and figure out where this happened!

DALI

We did a few other things in and around Lijiang before we left including visiting a the famous traditional Chinese doctor Ho who prescribed my friend Johnathon some herbs of dubious usefulness for his persistent cough.

We arrived right in the nick of time to catch the last train to Dali...though unfortunately all the seats had already sold out. Luckily though, there were still STANDING tickets available for this 3 hour journey. By this point i'd tried all the combinations of train styles and classes, but this was the first time i'd tried standing, and it was pretty much as bad as it sounds! The carriage is packed with the sitters and all the other standers, with a constant flow of people moving up and down the carriage, so any hope of being able to sit down in the aisle for a bit evaporated pretty quickly!

Wasn't too bad in the end, though I think 3 hours is about my maximum for that particular style of travelling!

We did make it Dali though, safe and well. I have extremely fond memories of this place, although sadly due to various reasons we could only spend around full day here. On the first night, we did stumble across a rather seedy red light district area which was interesting to see but also seemed well dodgy.

The next day though, we rented some mountain bikes and went on a random rinseout through the countryside. This is pretty much my favourite way to get out and see a place, and this was a really exceptional bike ride! It was a hot sunny day and you can see the Dali mountain landscape all around you...was a really nice change from a lot of congested Chinese cities we'd been working through up to this point.

We also 'hit the jackpot' so to speak with regard to the local fauna and flora. Having trained my eye to scan the undergrowth in North Korea, I caught sight of the unmistakeable spiky protrusions of the weed plant, a whole load of full plants growing by the side of the road. We were pretty lucky as this was well at the tail end of the season for em and you could see some of them were already starting to wither.

We found some females too, so all was good to go. This was of course most exciting and we proceeded to fill our boots with plant loads of the stuff. Soon enough we realised that we hadn't come across anything particularly special for this area, it's all over the place here!

Thankfully, I'd stocked up on king rizla's previously, and we were able to find ourselves a lovely lakeside spot and proceeded to roll up some phatties.

It was really cool being out here in the countryside, curious locals would come up and talk to us or otherwise shout hello. My first report on China took a bit of a downer at times, but our experiences down in the South of the country definitely made up for this - it's a really nice, chilled out place to visit and there is endless stuff to explore here and amazing, vast landscapes if you like that sort of thing.

Sadly, this day rinsed by way too quickly and we had to cycle back rather furiously in order to catch the train to our next destination, Kunming! Keep scrolling down!

to collect are definately rather endearing and humorous creatures to watch. They spend most of their time sleeping. If you do catch them moving about, they will normally be happily chomping on some bamboo shoots.

Panda's are the Chinese national treasure and they hold them with very high regard and respect....though I was still a bit disappointed at the size of the enclosures, which (considering the massive size of the entire research complex), are a bit on the small side.

That said, these guys are doing important work for this critically endangered species. It was interesting talking to the Puerto Rican guy who got us inside the place about his work researching the Panda's and trying to his best to encourage them to shag each other. Despite their cute looks I did meet another guy in Vietnam that had worked with the panda's here and got attacked by one!

Perhaps the panda was just venting his frustration with constantly being egged on to reproduce all the time, can't you just leave me alone? what is this modern obsession with everyone having to hump each other all the time anyway? What happened to just having a quiet night in with some nice bamboo to munch on?

We did also get to see some baby ones too, a rare sight and they are also understandably cute.

I was particularly enamoured by the red panda's (firefoxes) which are almost as endangered as the giant version. Apparantly these are actually the 'original' panda's (hence the name of giant panda for the creature one commonly associates with panda).

The red panda's were actually able to climb out of their enclosure and come and hang around with us human beings - to the point that we could get right near them and take close up pics and stroke them.

At first I wasn't too sure about this, with a little crowd of people surrounding the little mateys, but it soon became clear that they were just out for scraps of food the tourists give them (despite the signs urging otherwise out of respect for not ruining their carefully tuned diet).

They were comfortable around people though and perfectly capable of holding their own or getting away if they wanted to.

Warning signs around the place pointed out that the red panda's are 'somewhat fierce' and that several visitors had been attacked by them, so basically don't get too up in their face or you will get what you deserve!

Well, there's not much more to say here - there were a load of panda's and they are funny to look at. If you wanna see more pics of these interesting fella's check out the gallery pics at the bottom of the page!

LIJIANG
 

Our next stop was the old traditional Chinese town of Lijiang. We arrived here around 2am, with no place booked to stay and spent a good couple of hours getting rejected by taxi's who couldn't understand where we wanted to go, and getting driven around the place by confused drivers. We ended up stranded roughly in the area where we wanted to be, with no place to stay. I think around 5am after knocking on various doors and waking up several people, we managed to find a somehwere that would put us up for the night . We ended up sleeping with the three of us guys in one bed. How romantic.

Lijiang was a really nice little place to visit if you want get a real feel for that traditional Chinese vibe. The food was pretty amazing, my favourite being the BBQ's yak meat which is a regional speciality.

We ended up staying a couple of nights in a nice traditional style guesthouse with a courtyard and chickens and whatnot. I'd recommend visiting, but it doesn't have much staying appeal. It's pretty geared up for tourists (albeit almost entirely Chinese) so stuff is more expensive than average for China, and also it's just not a big place so you can see most of it in a couple of days max.

We came across all manner of charming things in this little town. There is a nice dragon park though (as with most things with China) there is an entrance fee which we suspected was significantly higher for non Chinese. Though we did manage to circumvent this fee by crawling through some undergrowth to get in there.
 

We met a load of other travellers here, seemed to be a bit of a hub for those wanting to get a bit deeper into the Chinese countryside, so we met up with various outdoorspeople, ramblers and mountain climbing folk.

I also vaguely remember getting involved with in a bit of a jamming session with guitars and bongo drums with some of the locals in a back street bar, it as a really good evening even though I don't remember that much of it.

TIGER LEAPING GORGE

The Tiger Leaping Gorge is a massive canyon in the rural Chinese countryside and was one of the main reasons we had been working our way in this direction. It involves a two day long fairly intense hike with a stop off at one of the guesthouses located around half way along the gorge.

It really is something to behold! There are huge mountains towering over you as you make your way up and along the gorge. I would say it's probably not for the faint hearted -  aswell as a pretty arduous uphill path for a large portion of it, there are many sections that if you so much as make a wrong step or slip up you will fall to your certain doom. Apparantly trekkers have died by getting stuck up around here from time to time so I would recommend going with some other people.

There are a load of pics here so i'm going to have to break up my flow a little bit - the text continues so SCROLL DOWN!

KUNMING

I could have spent a lot longer in Dali, but alas, we had a conflict of various interests that meant we had to leave, including the fact I needed to pick up a visa and sort out another one for Vietnam.

We got a sleeper train together to Kunming. This re-iterated to myself the point I made earlier about China being a good place to have a little crew of people to or at least someone else to go travelling around with. It's no problem going by yourself - it just makes things a bit more fun, particularly with trains and other transport, and you don't feel quite so out of place being the only foreigner on an otherwise only Chinese filled train!

We ended up in Kunming and back in another sprawling Chinese metropolis. We had a couple of days here, before our little trio had to split up and go our seperate ways - Salvi went on to Hong Kong and Jonathon flew back to France.

We did do a few things here though including going to this posh Chinese spa/sauna place which was very relaxing apart from the point we realised we were in the part where you have to be naked and we an insistent security guard would only let the us stay there if we removed our swimming shorts! We did comply in the end, perhaps he wanted to see how big our equipment was. The other Chinese men were also naked so yeah whatever, when in Rome and all that.

We had a totally awesome night out clubbing before we all split up in the morning. It was another one of those uniquely Chinese nightclub experiences :)

HERE I GO AGAIN ON MY OWN

Annoyingly, I ended up somewhat stuck in Kunming for a week while I waited for the Vietnemese embassy to sort out my Visa. This wasn't ideal, mainly because Kuming doesn't have all that much to offer despite being such a big city....there were a few interesting seeming places to go to if you got out of the city for a bit, but without having met any new mateys to go and explore with, I lacked the motivation to do all that much for these few days.

I remember writing in my notebook how I considered myself to be an inmate stuck in this hostel until I was given my release papers (i.e. getting my passport back!). Interestingly, the hostel I was in seemed to be a bit of a hub for other travellers also kind of at a loose end for one reason or another. It was like nobody actually really wanted to be here, but because it is a major transport hub, people would inevitably end up stuck here. I met the Faroe Islands couple I mentioned earlier, but both of them had got food poisoning from the same hostel we were staying at, and as a result were holed up for a couple of days, and had to cancel a trip to Nepal as a result...god damn!!

Well my situation was nowhere near that bad...I was just moping around a bit too much I guess...I also met an ex-crackhead from Essex and we went to a nightclub. That was one of the better nights during my Kunming incarceration. What was also funny was that they have a 'Modern Toilet' restaurant in this town! All the seats are toilets and all the food is served in little toilets. How weird is that?!!

YANGSHUO

I'm skipping over details here, including a couple of nights in a nice little place called Guelin...but this report has started to go on long enough! My next stop was Yangshuo. This is really a lovely little place and I would say that if you could only go to one place in the whole of China, go here!

It's a pretty touristy little town, but it's got a really chilled out vibe and friendly people. I felt like I could have stayed a lot longer...but unfortunately I only had a few days left on my visa (which i'd already extended once in Chengdu). So I had to make the most of it if I didn't want to get accosted by the Chinese border guards as I tried to make my way out of the country, or worse...deported!!

The area is full of these magical little mountains that stretch for miles in all directions. I hired a bike and went on a long solo mission all around the place. It's the perfect kind of place to go wandering around on a bike. With my mp3 player, some tinnies and some phat tunes, this was an unmistakeably awesome part of my whole experience in China.

I also met some cool people here including John Travolta and a guy from Exeter that knew some of the same people that I used to hang out with when I lived in Exeter. He was here studying tai-chi and he came across as a kind of ultra-chilled zen master with lots of philosophical insights on life...though he had a background very similar to mine involving lots of raves and parties and mind bending chemicals and who seemed to have a bit of a split personality, leading to him being simultaneously known by separate groups of people respectively as  'dangeous dave' and 'the cool wind'. My kinda guy!

By the way, I didn't actually meet the actual John Travolta...this guy just looked and sounded so exactly like him that it might aswell have been him.

On one of my last nights in Yangshuo, I hooked up with a couple of Chinese people who spoke reasonable English and they hooked me up with their friends. We ended up going on an all night mega binge which was pretty awesome.

We started off having a meal which I embarrassingly struggled to eat with chopsticks ("how am I getting worse at using these the longer I've stayed in China??!"), but it was all resolved in the end and I went out drinking Chinese style. This time I was by myself and I didn't have any western mateys to fall back on in case everything all just got a bit too Chinese!!

The Chinese like their drink but sometimes I think it's just an excuse to play their variously intense, complex and often fantastic drinking games! We got through a lot of them this evening, I don't remember that many of them, but one of them involves putting a piece of tissue paper over a glass. The tissue paper has a dice suspended in the middle of it. You then take it in turns to burn a hole in the tissue paper with a cigarette. The one that burns the tissue too much so that the dice falls through has to drink a load.

There were various other dice related games and also involving cards that resulted in a cumulative buildup of shots of beer that would then be put into a big jug that the loser had to drink. I think it was after a couple of these that they managed to convince me to sing karaoke to the only English tune available on their system which was Adele - Rolling in The Deep.

This actually went a lot better than I had expected, and got a much better response than similar karaoke fails while in North Korea, including from people walking by on the street outside the bar we were in! This particular bar also had a climbing wall and a trapeze which was a nice touch when pretty fucked. Somewhere at the tail end of this night I tried some BBQ's cows penis which was the first time i'd tried that particular delicacy. hmm....yeah....Chewy!

One of the girls we were hanging out with called Friday had this orange cap with HTML as it's logo. I thought this was pretty funny and wanted it, I asked if I could buy it off her, but she refused. Apparently this is some unique Korean brand that you can only get in certain shops.

Well, I kept hassling her to sell it to me, but in the end she took pity on me and just gave it to me for free, so I was pretty delighted with that. That's pretty much the last thing I remember about Yangshuo...I'd like to go back there someday! I also started writing a coupla new tunes here in  China, watch this space for those.

In summary, my second Chinese installment was a lot better than the first, and there is scope to spend a huge amount of time in the really lovely southern parts of the country, especially if you can get out of the cities. I had 2.5 months in China in total, and by the end I still felt like I was rushing through a little bit too much and could have happily stayed longer. Although China presents its fair share of challenges, there is surprising, shocking and often very funny stuff around pretty much any corner and you find yourself in all sorts of weird and wonderful situations.

It's also a really great place to meet fellow travellers and expats who are off on all sorts of random missions and assignments, something I have missed being in Vietnam which is pretty tame in comparison and there is mostly a lot of tourist types here...unfortunately they have limited usefulness.

The tail end of my trip in China involved having to go through Nanning to catch my connection to Hanoi Vietnam. Nanning was pretty awful so I'm not gonna go into it...but Vietnam on the other hand is awesome but you'll have to wait for the next update for that! :)

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