China

I’ve written this before, but 11am is the sweet spot for departing a place. We can wake up without alarms, eat, pack up, and get to the station or airport on time. Today, we took a taxi to the Guilin train station and then waited for our train. It was chaotic and packed. Perhaps the…

We said goodbye to our hotel in Yangshuo. Nick and I agreed it was probably the best room yet. We had been worried about coming to China because there is no Airbnb here, and we vastly prefer that to hotels. Luckily, there are two bedroom suites and “aparthotels” instead. This one had two large bedrooms…

We—me especially—had the most blissfully boring day today. There was something scratching around in the walls of our hotel last night and it kept me up most of the night, so I woke up exhausted. And I think I’m just generally wiped from the go go go nature of the last couple of days. So…

We took our time getting ready and then requested a Didi (ride share taxi) to the hotel. It took 10 minutes to match with a driver, and when we finally did he was 15 minutes away. After another 10 minutes of waiting, he cancelled the trip. So we decided to walk the 20 minutes down…

I’m self conscious that I start every one of these posts with a description of our breakfast. So I’ll skip that and say that as soon as we finished, Millie and I jumped into the hotel pool. It was already about 90 degrees here and humid. We swam while Nick worked out our next few…

We had a textbook transit day today. Our flight was at 12:50 so we didn’t need to set alarms. After we got up, we had breakfast noodles and then left the hotel at 10AM. Since there are no cars in the old city we had a porter come and help with our bags. We kept…

Much better day today. After more noodles for breakfast we walked through a big food market in search of the public bus that would take us up to Yulong Snow Mountain. We found it and were on our way. The journey took about an hour and Millie listened to music for the ride. She listened…

We didn’t have much on the agenda today other than exploring more and maybe going to a museum. Up first was hotel breakfast. This hotel is tiny so it was all made to order instead of a buffet. It was very traditionally Chinese, which I love and Nick and Millie don’t. In my older age…

We recovered enough to be able to head take our flight this morning. I was nervous about how packed the airport would be because today is China’s National Day and kicks off a week of vacation for the entire country. An estimated 700 million people travel this week, so it’s like Thanksgiving on steroids. In…

Welp, today’s post will be a quick one. We were up at 1AM both writhing with stomach pain. Nick was worse off than me, but we both had it. He started vomiting and I had, let’s just say, other symptoms. Everything was so spicy once again. He kept saying “what have we done?!” We were…