vancestevens

Travels in Guangdong and Guanxi , July 2004

In an Internet cafe in Guilin I mentioned to Barbara Dieu that I was frustrated that I couldn't post to my blogs at http://www.blogger.com, which along with anything on Geocities or Homestead, are blocked in China. She suggested I try Buzznet. This worked for me all over China, and allowed me to upload photos from my digital camera once I got back home. I put the rest of the photos online at Ofoto.

One prime goal of my journey was to visit Guilin and Yangsuo, legendary China traveler destinations. However, there was another reason I wanted to travel to this particular part of China. Yaodong is a Chinese English language teacher living in Liuzhou, not far from Guilin. We've been working together for some time via Webheads, a community of practice of online teachers and language learning students which has over the years picked up a lot of members from China. I wrote an article about Yaodong for an eZine column that I edit, about his online second-language communications techniques, which you can see and read here. Although we had never met, we had become good online friends with mutual respect for each other's work, and when I expressed an interest in traveling to that part of the world, Yaodong put me in touch with a lot of his current and ex-students, many of whom had already joined Webheads.