Category: China

  Laura: We arrived into Kunming (the capital of Yunnan – a province in China famous for it’s beauty) in the morning. We exited the train and were over the moon to discover it was about 25 degrees and low humidity! In Yangshuo we only had to walk for 5 minutes before our sunglasses were falling off our ridiculously sweaty faces. We were collected by a lovely girl called Jenny from The Hump Hostel. She took us on a public bus to the hostel and we got checked in no fuss. The hostel had great communal areas but the dorms Continue Reading →

  Ahmad: We got a hard sleeper train to Guilin from Shanghai, and had a pretty uneventful trip. Both of us agree that Indian trains (when you manage to book one at least) are superior to Chinese trains, the berths are more comfortable and you get some semblance of privacy as most of the cabins have curtains.

  Ahmad: We arrived into Shanghai in the evening and headed straight to the Captain Hostel, I had some really fond memories of the Captain Hostel (I had lived here previously) and was looking forward to being back. On arrival we checked in and got up to our respective dorms (no mixed dorm’s at the captain), we got ourselves sorted then headed up to the rooftop bar, the hostel itself hadn’t had a refurb in quite some time (I imagine since I was in china 7 years ago) and I was bitterly disappointed to see how far it had fallen. Continue Reading →

  Ahmad: We were a little sad to leave Xian; we also had some real difficulty getting train tickets for Beijing. In the end only had ‘Hard seat’ tickets were available.

  Laura: We arrived at Chengdu train station expecting it to be chaotic but it was very well organised. Ahmad was quite disappointed to note that nobody was smoking or spitting and was suddenly fearful that smoking was banned on Chinese trains. We boarded and found our sleeper cabin which was very similar to Indian ‘3AC’ class. We were travelling on ‘hard sleeper’ which consists of 6 beds to a cabin among about 10 of these in one train car. You can travel ‘hard seat’ which is basically loads of seats in a train cabin, ‘standing’ where you just sit Continue Reading →

  Laura: We flew to China via Lhasa in Tibet and saw the most beautiful sight in the world for free! The snowy peaks of the Himalaya rising out of the clouds to meet a perfect blue sky. Apparently tourists often commission planes to do this but we just got lucky! We arrived at Chengdu Airport around 4pm and after hitting the ATM we found our pick up man from the hostel and made our way there.