Arrival at Bangkok’s amazing airport the second time was much easier than the first and a bus over to the now familiar surroundings of Kao San Road felt a bit like coming home, although being back in the company of so many westerners took a bit of getting used to! A couple of ‘admin’ days were followed by the 13 hour train journey to Chiang Mai - first stop on the well worn backpacker route to Laos. A day visiting a few of the 300 or so local wats (temples), gave us some interesting comparisons between Burmese and Thai Buddhism (and [View Full Entry]

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OK, we know it’s been a while now and we are very behind with the blog, so in answer to the people who suggested it should be our new year’s resolution to update it more often we have decided, new year, new start (well, almost)! Here is our Myanmar missive and we will be going back and adding the missing bits (Tibet, Nepal and India) as and when we get the opportunity to do so. So, to Burma (or the Union of Myanmar to give it its current name) - a place we discussed visiting long and hard. Do our tourist [View Full Entry]

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No photo with this one as a section of the Japan photos appear to have to have been mislaid, when we find them we'll post them! Our arrival in Osaka early evening took us straight to Dotonbori for dinner and a search for a suitably kitsch Love hotel. Many were entered and many were left for not being kitsch enough. We finally settled on an S&M dungeon! For those who do not know what a love hotel is, in a country of 100 year mortgages passed down from generation to generation, families living together in small houses and sex before marriage [View Full Entry]

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Tokyo, well, where to start? 8:30 sushi? Love hotels? Plastic food? Electro/Jazz fusion? Pretty boy ‘hosts’? Guitar hero arcades? Best just start at the beginning I guess! We arrived late in the evening, in the rain, and leapt straight in with our first capsule hotel experience. A very odd experience it was too, from the slightly seedy entrance to the dark dorm rooms full of people in the pyjamas provided for you at reception, who were just sitting around in the gloom, faces lit by the glow of the small pay TVs in each capsule or the occasional laptop screen. Most [View Full Entry]

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Armed with our newly acquired Japan Rail Passes and plenty of snacks (Claire seems to have developed a monkey nut fetish on this part of the trip - she just won’t travel without them), we boarded the Su Zhou Hao ferry bound for Osaka. We were welcomed on board by smiley and efficient Japanese staff and shown to our spacious 4 berth cabin with tatami matted lounge and panoramic window, which we ended up having all to ourselves as there were not many passengers on board. Hurrah. We popped up onto deck to watch a very hazy Shanghai disappear behind us [View Full Entry]

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Travelling by bullet train (shinkansen) was a fast, efficient and comfortable experience, which began with us forming an orderly queue by our carriage number which was clearly marked on the platform where the train pulled in precisely to the mark and we boarded in an almost leisurely manner with everybody waiting patiently for their turn to get on and the train pulled gently away exactly on time. So far so not China! Refreshments were served by pretty Japanese girls wearing smart uniforms who bowed as they entered and exited each carriage - bowing is something else to get used to in [View Full Entry]

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The train was really comfortable, although the Chinese people seem to go to bed very early and consequently get up very early, starting the day with a pot noodle (as you do) Making lay ins and not also wanting to eat pot noodles very difficult! After our previous success with following a hostel tout to a hostel we thought we’d repeated it, unfortunately, with a lesser degree of success on this occasion (possibly the least helpful people outside of Russia on reception). It was in the right part of town though and we managed to negotiate a discount on the room [View Full Entry]

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After another comfortable sleeper train journey, we arrived in Shanghai - our last destination in China before Japan. We skilfully negotiated the Metro system and found the hostel. Quick shower and change and out to explore. Our first stop was People’s Square - the central ‘hub’ of the city - a real mix of impressive sky-scrapers, all glass curtain walling, steel and neon lights, along with old British buildings from the 1930’s and tiny-by-comparison residential ‘hutong style’ backstreets all wedged in around a huge park. A real melting pot of cultures an [View Full Entry]

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Blogs are like buses, you wait for ages and then..... Early the next morning (have you noticed how many early mornings we’re doing, its worse than going to work you know!) We got the slowest taxi in town to the bus station, where we boarded a rickety old bus to Taiyuan for the connecting bus to Pingyao, an ancient Ming dynasty walled banking city which has remained relatively untouched and is now a major tourist attraction as all the Qing dynasty architecture exits much as it was. After Dan took charge and organized motorcycle rickshaws for us and the other westerners [View Full Entry]

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Wutai Shan, one of China’s sacred Buddhist mountain ranges. The range is dedicated to the Manjusri Buddha, the Buddha of wisdom. After a fairly uneventful but beautiful journey (other than the driver overtaking on blind mountain road bends at high speed!), we paid the steep entrance fee to the area, much more expensive than our Rough Guide said it was! Nevertheless the scenery was stunning and we were excited about visiting all the temples and perhaps seeing some monks going about their daily business. On arrival, we were met by numerous hotel touts and picked one at random, whi [View Full Entry]

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