Wednesday, January 25, 2006
The Trip So Far
Hello Everyone!
I thought we should post a little something during our travels. We will be more forthcoming once we are back in Haikou, with loads more (vaguely) interesting stories and nice photos, but for now, here is a little recap of what we have been up to. For the last two weeks we have been to Kunming, Dali and Lijiang. We loved each place, each quite different. We have been to markets filled with people from minority groups in their colourful traditional dress. We've hired bikes and cycled to interesting little minority villages. We did a day trip to Tiger Leaping Gorge two days ago (the world's deepest canyon). It was absolutely spectacular, but we didn't realise we had signed up for a trek that meant climbing down a near vertical cliff for hundreds of feet to the river. The path (if you could call it that) was a series of staircases, ladders, marks on the ground and just general scree. All with huge drops to your death if you took a foot wrong, it was the most terrifying thing we had done and we are still recovering now - our legs are incredibly painful and we feel very happy to be alive. Most people who trek the gorge do it in two days by walking along higher paths but we somehow ended up descending the "sky ladder" - more about that when we get back to Haikou. It was, BTW, a truly amazing experience and we saw some spectacular views - we did really enjoy it (honest)!
We are now back in Kunming and have decided to change our plans for the next two weeks. We are heading from here east to Guangxi province and going to Nanning, Guilin, then Yangshuo, and then finally to Guangzhou - from where we have amazingly cheap flights back to Haikou. We have really enjoyed ourselves so far and have had some funny experiences (apart from Rupert's heavy cold and TWO bouts of evil food poisoning), at one point Hannah got confused by some signs and asked in a (admittedly very nice looking) public toilet if they had any rooms for the night!! We'll do a longer blog once we get back to Haikou. For now we will leave you with some pictures to whet your appetite...
I thought we should post a little something during our travels. We will be more forthcoming once we are back in Haikou, with loads more (vaguely) interesting stories and nice photos, but for now, here is a little recap of what we have been up to. For the last two weeks we have been to Kunming, Dali and Lijiang. We loved each place, each quite different. We have been to markets filled with people from minority groups in their colourful traditional dress. We've hired bikes and cycled to interesting little minority villages. We did a day trip to Tiger Leaping Gorge two days ago (the world's deepest canyon). It was absolutely spectacular, but we didn't realise we had signed up for a trek that meant climbing down a near vertical cliff for hundreds of feet to the river. The path (if you could call it that) was a series of staircases, ladders, marks on the ground and just general scree. All with huge drops to your death if you took a foot wrong, it was the most terrifying thing we had done and we are still recovering now - our legs are incredibly painful and we feel very happy to be alive. Most people who trek the gorge do it in two days by walking along higher paths but we somehow ended up descending the "sky ladder" - more about that when we get back to Haikou. It was, BTW, a truly amazing experience and we saw some spectacular views - we did really enjoy it (honest)!
We are now back in Kunming and have decided to change our plans for the next two weeks. We are heading from here east to Guangxi province and going to Nanning, Guilin, then Yangshuo, and then finally to Guangzhou - from where we have amazingly cheap flights back to Haikou. We have really enjoyed ourselves so far and have had some funny experiences (apart from Rupert's heavy cold and TWO bouts of evil food poisoning), at one point Hannah got confused by some signs and asked in a (admittedly very nice looking) public toilet if they had any rooms for the night!! We'll do a longer blog once we get back to Haikou. For now we will leave you with some pictures to whet your appetite...
