(Part of a series of articles by Fi trawling the archives for photos taken on the tiny compact camera way back when).

Our last days of 2011 were spent in Hong Kong & China. Hong Kong – the first place that we could wear a t-shirt & sunglasses. This was exciting after our 2 months of snow & rain! Cable car escapades, romantic (ha!) snowfall moments and fetching Hello Kitty accessories. Sunshine, sunshine!

Next onto Guilin to bring in the New Year.  Rain, rain, mist & rain. The western calendar’s new year isn’t really a big thing in China what with having the Chinese New Year so we struggled to find anywhere to celebrate in the usual style. We wandered past some extremely flattened ducks for sale on the street.  ‘Paul’s Steak House’ immediately seemed a better choice for dinner. After a stupidly oversized meal we stopped off at ‘Fiona’s bakery’ across the road. Stuffed and with little to entertain us 2012 began soberly. Nevertheless I woke with food poisoning the next day. Happy New Year!

As the gallery will show, the weather didn’t improve. We were booked onto a cruise from Guilin to Yangshuo. Google it. It looks amazing. Unfortunately we will have to rely on Google as all we saw was cloud as the guides pointed out well known Karst formations. Mmm we all nodded as we floated down the Li River. (our dismal pics are here & here if you want to see these again..) We spent a soggy night in a cold hostel with cold water. Returned to Guilin the following day and made arrangements for Nanning. The city of gold! Well actually, we’d heard that there was nothing to do and we were excited by this prospect. We had 3 days to kill waiting for our Vietnamese visas to be processed and had heard of a hostel that knew how to do things properly. Aahh, we spent 3 days watching films & playing Xbox on their sofa cosy under a blanket while they ordered in food & beer for us. This is almost certainly the most heavenly place in China!