Day 22

We arrived in Fujian Province at around 6pm and went straight to our accommodation: a round house! They weren’t as I imagined. Kind of like the castles of china, these enormous circular buildings are 3-4 stories tall housing hundreds of people in tiny simplistic bedrooms around the edge. The centre of the circle varied from a socialising courtyard to allotment style farming land.

Since we arrived so late, we couldn’t explore the village so we all went into our simplistic rooms and had some much appreciated alone time before going to sleep.

Day 23

We moved on to Mr. Liu’s house in a small village nearby who owns a small Guest House and convenience store. He was very sweet and bent over backwards to help us. We had breakfast there before heading off for a short walk around the local round houses.

We walked down to the round houses in the picture below where there were small market stalls and people drying out tea leaves in the sun

That afternoon, we went for a 14km bike ride to a nearby village for lunch. Ross and I were keen to actually do some exercise so were egging the driver (who was leading the way) to go faster. The road was quite hilly so we were rewarded with some incredibly long and steep downhills after some serious climbs.

We stopped half way and some of the group wanted to go slower (which annoyed Ross and I) so we ended up just overtaking the car and hoping that there were no turnings on the way to the destination.

Following the bike ride, we went to a spot on the local river to have a dip. For some reason, I didn’t want to go in (everyone was saying how cold it was) so I dipped my feet in and took some photos of the idyllic view.

Then on to our final night train to Guangzhou to change over to Macau!

Day 24

Annoyingly, STA screwed up my trip and booked my flight a day early, so I missed the final day in Macau. As it turns out, the group only had about 3 hours in Macau before coming back to Hong Kong, so I didn’t miss much by going straight to HK.

And thus concludes my trip to China with The Dragon Trip.

Hostels we stayed in

Yangshuo            131 International Hostel (quirky yet damp, good location)

Chengdu              Mr. Panda Guest House (clean and good location)

Xi’an                      Shuyan (amazing setting and layout, clean, right by city wall)

Bandeng Guest House (small family run guest house- basic but nice)

Beijing                  Leo Hostel (fun vibrant hostel, clean and social)

Moganshan        Howoolife Hostel (basically a spa retreat!)

Shanghai             Phoenix Hostel (Nice restaurant downstairs, clean, comfy and good location)