Travellers stare kitsch horror bus in the face

No. of street sweepers per square kilometre: 10 - communism and all that
No. of days snow: 3
Hours spent queueing at train station not to get a ticket: 5
Current pool score: Richard - 13 Pauline - 7
Number of tantrums during pool: Pauline 13 Richard 0
Speed of the Shanghai to Beijing sleeper train: 243 km/h

A quick update from Guilin (home of the HSBC adverts showing the fishermen collaborating with the cormorants). Its nice to finally see some Chinese countryside although the food is still a minefield, for Pauline at least! Who knew Tofu would be served with minced beef sauce (and the menu was in English with no word of a cow!). We flew from Beijing to Guangzhou since there was no other form of transport not fully booked and after a few enjoyable days there took a sleeper bus here which was interesting. Unlike India where the worry is cockroaches and the cold, we suffered from death by Chinese (anti-American) movies and variety shows played throughout the night and the sweltering heat from the air-con not because it was actually hot! Add to that the dolls house-esque furnishing with beds sized for far-eastern proportions and the sealife scene glass flooring meant it was a strange, sleep deprived experience.

Anyway we're here now and it gave us something to blog about! Onto Yangshuo tomorrow (supposedly more picturesque) and then to Hong Kong where we've managed to book the last two beds in town, albeit in a shared dorm with shared squat toilet (good exercise for the quads!).

Struggling to upload videos and photos at the moment or even get on the net sometimes so please be patient, there's lots to share from the last few weeks.

One final thought, in one of the nicest hostels we've stayed in a rat has just ran over my feet! The staff just said: 'Don't scare him he's our pet!'