Tag: travel

A Whirlwind Weekend Seeing The Terracotta Warriors

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With just over a month left in China, Mitch and I are pushed for time to visit places. While we take opportunities during the Chinese National Holidays, these weekends are ridiculously busy at the hot-spot tourist places (The Yellow Mountain on New Year’s Day = Very bad idea!). With this is mind, we decided to pick a random weekend to visit the famous Terracotta Warriors in Xi’an. A domestic flight from Hangzhou airport got us there in about two hours. We’ve avidly been trying to avoid air travel while in China (up until Xi’an we’d only taken two domestic flights in …

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Tranquiltiy and Adventure in Xingping

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If you’ve ever had a 20 RMB note, you’ll have seen the gorgeous karst mountains and the Li river that roams in the South West of China. The location on the note is in a small village called Xingping. On most days, the small village is home to lots of tourists, taking lots of photos with their 20 RMB note and enjoying boat rides down the river, looking in awe at the surroundings. It really is a spectacular sight. However, my favourite part of Xingping wasn’t the place where we match up our note with the river and mountains. There are parts …

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How to survive a cold spell in Hangzhou

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This weekend Hangzhou reached some of the coldest temperatures the city has seen in many years. My school got closed due to the weather, and Mitch had buggered off to Cambodia as he’s already broken up, which meant I was left alone in our very cold flat (no central heating or double glazing) . However, despite sub zero temperatures and water cut outs – I’m still here, alive and well. Here’s how I survived. If you find yourself in a cold city, these tips may work for you too.  Buy yourself some proper pyjamas. If you’ve ever been to some non …

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Welcome to Helen The Bristolian Backpacker

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Hello! Thank you so much for visiting Helen The Bristolian Backpacker. The site use be a wordpress blog but I’ve now transformed it to give you, my wonderful readers, a better experience as I share more of my backpacking stories. The site is still very new but is always developing as I add new content and lots more great stuff. As a budget backpacker, I want to share information about places with you, and some tales along the way too! Please let me know your thoughts and comments below – What do you like? What would you like to see more of? …

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A Happy New Year in Huangshan

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We wanted to hit the ground running with travelling in 2016, so on 1st January Mitch and I headed west of Hangzhou to the town of Tunxi. Nestled in the south of Anhui Province, it’s a great base to explore the surrounding area. Our plan was to visit Mount Huangshan (the Yellow Mountain) on the Saturday, but if the weather wasn’t right there are plenty of other places within easy access of Tunxi to explore. Thankfully, the weather was wonderful! We arrived on Friday evening and found our hostel, located in a very swish, more modern area of town with coffee …

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Celebrating Thanksgiving in China

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Being British, I have never ever celebrated Thanksgiving. So when I got a message from a fellow British expat here in China, asking a group of us if we’d like to celebrate Thanksgiving on Thursday I wasn’t too bothered. I told Mitch but he thought we should go, sure, we’re in China, but why not celebrate other cultures and festivals.

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