I was pleasantly surprised that the train journey only took about 40 hours, rather than the 44 I was expecting. This time I had a “hard sleeper” with a middle bunk - in the hard sleeper compartments they cram the bunks in three deep. So the train ride from Beijing to Urumqi was much more comfortable than the one from Guilin to Beijing had been. Still the beds were very small (almost exactly the same width as my hips) and being on the middle bunk there was nowhere save to put my day-pack in which I keep all my valuables such [View Full Entry]

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I’m a bit rushed today so hopefully I don’t miss any of the bits. I’d already written the first part, about Dongyue temple, so that should be OK. I’m leaving for Almaty tomorrow (Monday), so not sure how often I’ll have Internet access after this. I uploaded more photos but Travelblog is still buggy, and I don't have time to do it again ... there were a about two shots of Tiananmen square that've gone missing, and about four of the Great Wall, but I guess there's enough of those to keep you happy. Now most religions are weird. Christianity, with [View Full Entry]

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My allergies were back again. Not as bad as in Bangkok, so they didn’t make me look strange, but I woke up in the night in Yanshuo with my whole back driving me crazy with itching and with large welt-like rashes on it again. It made it hard to sleep, so I dug around in my first-aid kit and found some of the left-over anti-histamines, the ones the first Bangkok doctor prescribed me and the second doctor told me to not take, and fell straight back to sleep, probably because they’re the ones that cause drowsiness. The same thing happened the [View Full Entry]

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For those who got an earlier message about the lack of photos - I've now managed to upload them (and deleted the ones which Travelblog in its wisdom thought it would be nice to upload twice, without giving us an easy way to delete photos), so you should see some photos. Because it's such a hassle doing it about four times, I haven't put much in most of the captions. So I arrived in Hanoi at about 04:30 a.m. I’d decided to stay at the Hanoi Backpackers, which was a bit of a mistake. When you’re off the beaten track, those [View Full Entry]

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Thanks to Mark G for picking up the tyop in the title. It's nice to know that at least one person is at least reading the titles :-) Phnom Penh seems nicer than I remembered it. Perhaps it has changed a little, for the better, in one year, although I can’t imagine that it would really have changed so much in such a short time. Perhaps I just saw nicer parts of it this time round. In some ways it reminded me just a little bit of East Timor, of course because in the back of one’s mind there’s always [View Full Entry]

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for those who didn't read this blog earlier - Travelblog (the provider that hosts my blog) deleted all the photos that were uploaded over a twelve-day period in April, including these ones. Their only comment is that one has to uplaod them all again. Given that it takes me a long time to wokr out which photos I want to upload, and that Travelblog makes the actual uploading very difficult, it's not an easy thing to do. So for the time being you just have to imagine that they're really great photos. Actually, the first one was quite nice, a [View Full Entry]

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For people who hassle me when I don’t post a blog for a week - this is because I mainly write my blogs during long train/bus/ferry trips. This one is being written in a bus from Bangkok to Kanchanaburi, which isn’t far, but that’s a story for the next blog. For the last eight days, I’ve been stuck in Bangkok, and so haven’t been inclined to write, plus I haven’t done anything interesting. This is for two reasons: firstly, I was a little bit ill. Secondly, I’ve been shopping for visas. In my last blog, I ended with a prediction about [View Full Entry]

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This blog was written on March 20 and Mach 24. So I’m sitting in the ferry from Jakarta to Batam. It’s a Pelni ferry, which is the large company which runs fast ferries all over Indonesia and have a virtual monopoly on many of the longer routes. The ferry is spic and span in much the same way that Malcolm Turnbull has a good handle on the Australian economy - that is to say, not really. It’s also full of cockroaches, which, I hasten to add, is where the Liberal Party metaphor begins to break down. Actually I’m not even [View Full Entry]

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As I mentioned in the last blog, this one is a bit behind reality - I visited these temples on March 15 I'm having troubles uploading the pics, I think Travelblog is playing up, and my connection here is slow, after about three hours I'm giving up. Sorry if some of the photos are missing, or are in here twice, or are upside down, or don't have a comment. Blame Travelblog, which seems to be down more often than it's up The most famous attractions of Yogya are the two ninth-century temples, Borobodur and Prambanan. To see both temples I took [View Full Entry]

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So at the end of the last blog I was in Yogyakarta, universally called “Yogya” (pronounced “Jogja”). This found me in the middle of Java, which is the most populous island on earth by a country mile. In other words, it has a population (over 120 million) about that of Japan in an island not much more than half the size of Victoria. Yogya is often called the “soul” of Indonesia, which I don’t think is meant to mean that it exists only as an epiphenomenon of the brain but rather that it’s Indonesia’s cultural, historical, religious and ed [View Full Entry]

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