DarSch

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 this. After meeting up with the group we had an afternoon of free time, Stacey, Blahine and I headed off to the Bell and Drum Tower, they were exactly as decribed. Large Chinese style towers ... read more

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 had a little bit of time so I headed back up to the room to sort out my crap attempt at packing. After that and a little lye down I headed over to the train ... read more

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 backpacker tour, we start in Shanghai, then Suzhou, Xian and back to Beijing. The hotel is actually very nice, it's a bit of a walk from everything but again has free ethernet connection in the ... read more

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 the window, I was getting quite excited about China. There were supposed to be views of the Great Wall of China from the train but no luck so far. I had my first real Chinese ... read more

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. There were a few monks around but most of the time there were just kids around who would shove bags of seeds in your pocket (to feed pigeons) and say '1000'. It was a nightmare ... read more