Woke up with barely a hint of a hangover. I left the train and was at the back of the group when I realised I left my shoes on board. I ran back on and off just before it pulled out, job done but I lost the group and guess what, yep, no-one realised I was gone until it was to late and I was left and the train station on my own with no hotel name. Another phone call to Jerry and exactly the same routine as last time and I was at the hotel, i'm getting quite good at [View Full Entry]

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Today was water town day, basically a chinese Venice, I tried to find it in Lonely Planet but there is no reference to it, it was called Zhouzhuang. It was absolutely jammed with Chinese tourists and tourist tat but once you looked past that it was quite pretty. I ended up buying some scrolls with pictures of plants (bamboo etc) on them for 150 yuan, probably to expensive but not to bad and it was a local family down a side alley rather than on the main streets and I got to meet the whole family including grandpa. The weather started [View Full Entry]

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Things have gone wrong. I was woken up by the guide shaking me and saying that we were about to leave. Shit....I hadn't even packed. I decided to have and 2 min shower and headed down, I couldn't have been more than 15mins but the group had already left, double shit. I asked reception if there were any messages, nope nothing. Now I wasn't that stressed, I knew the name of the town I was going to and had taken Chinese trains before so no worries, the only problem was that I didn't know the name of the hotel. Anyway I [View Full Entry]

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Woke up full of beans today, met the rest of the group and headed off to a 'traditional' area of Shanghai, they call it the tourist market and although it is based on an area which was a traditional market area they do now call it tourist market for a reason (hey maybe the simple labelling of things in China does have a benefit to it). After fighting through the crowds we made it to a kind of city garden, it dated back over 500 years and was basically a giant garden, we would call it a Japanese garden but being [View Full Entry]

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After a fairly good nights sleep I had a quick chat with the Chinese guy before we arrived in Shanghai, the train was quite fast so in 12hrs we had covered 1463km (taking my total to 11,954km). Shanghai was cold (well coldish) and raining, I was worried about finding the hotel as I only had an address in english (which is no good). Anyway I found a taxi and they rang up the hotel and got the address, got a little ripped off I think though but at least this time I bargained. This hotel was where I am starting my [View Full Entry]

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Bad idea going out last night and staying up so late, I was woken by a knock at the door and then a phone call. I had missed check out. I had a quick shower packed and headed down to reception, I had to pay a small charge ($4) for late check out. I was really hungover so I headed to the local chinese restaurant and had a nice long lunch with 3 cokes and two waters. I then had a nice 4 hours wait for my train, to be honest I should have done something but apathy ruled and I [View Full Entry]

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Well I got my first view of China today and it looks nice, we were handed meal vouchers for breakfast and lunch so the Norwegian guy and I headed of the restaurant car, there were a lot of english speakers on the train and a surprising amount of middle aged ones. Breakfast consisted of two boiled eggs, two slices of bread, jam, butter and tea. As I hadn't eaten anything but 6 biscuits for 36 hours it went down very well even if it was virtually thrown at us by the waitress. The next couple of hours were spent looking out [View Full Entry]

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This morning I had to catch my train to Beijing, as I mentioned last night I got home at 4am and as my train was at 7.30am I decided to give sleep a miss and sleep on the train. There were a few others catching the train so we got a lift (for a small charge) from the owner of the hostel. As soon as I got on the train I slept for the next 5 hours, I was sharing with a Chinese woman and a Norwegian guy. I didn't actually talk to any of them and there was no restaurant [View Full Entry]

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I decided that today I was going to see the sights of UB, I have only seen a few of the streets and the State Department Store. My first stop was the Gandantegchinlen Khiid, it's a monastery which covers about a sqkm, most of the buildings were crap but there was two I liked and one had a 26.5m standing Buddha (no photos though as this was $5 extra), you can see the photo of the outside of the building though, and the statue reached the roof, very big and impressive. The other building was a nice traditional designed wooden one. [View Full Entry]

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Woke up early again due to the group I mentioned last night leaving, today was a talk to Kasia day. I went to the same internet cafe as a few days ago but this time I was armed with my own microphone and earphones, did it help ? did it f**k. Luckily I had left 40 mins before I was due to call Kate so I had enough time to find another internet cafe that did have working Skype.We had a nice long chat which was only interrupted by a French guy talking next to me as loud as he possibly [View Full Entry]

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