Sorry for the delay, finding spare time and somewhere to plug in the computer a bit difficult - so here we are. Up for breakfast this morning (we have to keep up appearances now), not too flash as there was no cereal! Bacon and eggs and sweet toast, they also had little cream cakes with smiley faces on them but I’m not sure about that for breakfast (Asians seem to like sweets for breakfast - strange). After breakfast we met in the lobby at 9 to meet our guide and head off in our little bus to the Temple of Heaven [View Full Entry]

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Moving day today. Check-out time is 12 noon so by the time we have had breakfast there is not really any time to go anywhere or do anything so we kick back and make sure that we are not leaving anything behind. We check-out and catch the taxi to our next hotel and do the check-in thing again, the good thing this time is that it’s already paid for as part of our tour. We get a knock on the door at 4.30 from our leader Claire, a kiwi who’s been living in Aussie for the last 8 years or so [View Full Entry]

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This is the last whole day we will have on our own before we join up with the Sundowner tour group tomorrow evening. We are not sure if the tour will include the Olympic venues so we thought we would go and have a look just in case. The taxi took us the long way there by taking the expressways instead of going direct, consequently it cost us 40RMB and took about 15-20 minutes. (which is still cheaper than Bucklands Beach to O’Hagans!) All of the new Olympic venues were still being finished, or at least the surrounding grounds anyway, and [View Full Entry]

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Arriving at Beijing Railway Station we immediately noticed that there were no hawkers trying to sell you a taxi ride, or anything else for that matter. We bought a tourist map at the stall and proceeded to what was obviously the queue for the taxis while we tried to figure out where our hotel was on the map so we could show the driver. There were a few guards around trying to keep order and stop queue jumping and I believe they have also moved on the hawkers in preparation for the Olympics. The taxi driver found our hotel OK and [View Full Entry]

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We have a wee bit of a problem today, our overnight train for Beijing leaves at 8.36pm and we have to check out at 12pm, we managed to get a late checkout of 1pm but that still leaves about 7 hours hanging around with all of our gear. We can’t really carry it around the city with us so our only option is to go to the train station and hang around there like Viktor Navorski, at least his terminal was clean! There are thousands of people passing through each of 12 waiting rooms at Shanghai train station every hour but [View Full Entry]

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Despite the fact that the district we were in, 2-3 km south of the centre of ShangHai, looked a little rough we decided that we couldn’t hide in our room so we went for a little wander. There was a fair bit of demolition work going on around the place which didn’t make it any nicer and the dusty sidewalks were broken and uneven in places. I wouldn’t have felt comfortable taking photos but it wasn’t too bad really, we never felt intimidated at all. We even ventured into a little superette to find some coffee (they only have coffee sachets [View Full Entry]

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Kwan and Dana have to go back to Hangzhou today at about 9, and we are back on the train to ShangHai - alone! We say goodbye at the hotel and head off for breakfast - coffee, fresh fruit and baked beans on toast with bacon, yum. We hang around in the hotel until about 11.30 then gather our gear and catch a taxi. 16 RMB to the train station and I think the driver was pissed off when I didn’t give him a tip! Waiting in the departure room a young guy walked up to us and asked us where [View Full Entry]

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More sightseeing planned for today, the good news is that it isn’t so hot today, the bad news is that it’s raining again so we pack the trusty umbrellas. Destination Zhongshan Mountain National Park where there are several large monuments to important people and the site of 600 y.o. temples. According to the tourist guide it’s 21 sq.km of forest mountain with about eight different attractions of which we visited three. Dr Sun Yatsen’s mausoleum was the biggest and with 392 steps up to it was also the most hard work. Interesting to see how much time, effort and money the [View Full Entry]

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The trouble with not keeping up with diaries or bloggs every day is that you can easily confuse one day with the next. I forgot to mention somewhere we visited after lunch with Dana (Kwan was sick of walking!) which is well worth a mention. It was a memorial museum to remember the 300 000 Chinese men, women and children who were massacred by the Japanese on the days following Dec 13 1937 after being defeated in the preceding invasion on Nanjing. We couldn’t take photos inside but it was quite a powerful exhibition about an event that I personally knew [View Full Entry]

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Only been here a week and it seems like ages, hope everything is OK back at work (send that price book to the printers Tim!). Today we were off to Nanjing with or trusty guides Kwan and Dana and were catching the train from the city at 8.25am. We were up and checking out at 7 to catch our own taxi to the train station - just showed the guy our tickets and he got the idea. Taxis are really cheap here and they are so easy as long as you can tell them were you want to go! Minimum charge [View Full Entry]

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