Sign In
Stephanie & Paul
Leaving for a round-the-world trip in july08. Itinery includes USA vancouver, toronto, new zealand, australia, thailand, malaysia, vietnam and china. Planning on being away for about 8-9 monthsStephanie and Paul RTW
Travel Blog Posts
April 8th 2009
We took the overnight bus from tokyo to kyoto and arrived at 6am to a very closed looking city. One cafe was open so we sat and had breakfast and waited til a decent time to walk to our hostel. We had marked on our map where the hostel was unfortunately it had moved and the owner hadn't updated the information, eventually we tracked the place down and dumped our bags before heading to the textile museum to see weaving of kimono silk and a kimono fashion show. one of the weavers, a very small old man, kindly showed us the ins and outs of the loom speaking only in japanese, we got the main idea but mostly we were just nodding along politely unable to understand. We walked down through the imperial palace gardens, which ... read more
April 5th 2009
Konnichiwa, having arrived tired and flattened from the non-event that was Hong Kong, we were glad to find that our hostel was really nice in Tokyo. It was slightly strange in that the bunk beds were lower than normal with the bottom bunk being at floor level, and in bigger dorms they have three tiers! We asked at reception for a recommendation for somewhere to eat local food and they sent us to "Jonathons", an upmarket version of McDonalds with little in the way of Japanese food, when we told our Japanese friend that we had been she laughed out loud. We are booked to stay in the same hostel on our return from Kyoto and so we left our major baggage in storage there for a small fee and packed enough to last for the ... read more
April 3rd 2009
After landing in Hong Kong we caught the bus into the centre of Kowloon and our home for the next few nights. Having been up at 4 in the morning we were both feeling pretty tired so we had a nap before venturing out down Nathan road, the main street of the area. As soon as we walked out of the building we were inundated with people asking whether we wanted to buy a suit, fake watches or fake handbags, which we politely declined as we headed off in search of some food. We found a small restaurant serving cantonese food and, after hearing stories from others, chose some vegetarian dishes to try - it was pretty good! We then walked down to the harbour and the avenue of stars celebrating the contribution of Hong Kong ... read more
March 30th 2009
We've been in beijing for 6 days and could probably fill another 6 days, we had heard it was really smoggy here and were surprised to find it no worse than london. while we've been here we've hit the markets quite hard, i bought some silk and some clothes and paul bought a tailored suit! we went back for fittings and he picked it up today and its lovely, really smart. we arrived really early in the morning and as we passed tiananmen square the flocks of tour groups were already flooding in to queue up to see chairmen mao's body in the mausoleum. After dropping our bags at the hostel and having breakfast we walked to the square despite being told it was way to far and we should take the subway it only took ... read more
March 25th 2009
We arrived into the walled city of Pingyao at 6.49 in the morning and were met by a guy from the hostel. We waited a while for a friend from Xi'an to arrive but her train was late so just headed to the hostel on the back of a local taxi with the sun starting to rise. The streets were deserted at the early hour. We went for a walk along the old streets and looked into the many local shops. All of the buildings within the walls were of gray bricks with the stereotypical red lanterns hanging out into the streets. It was all very nice. We were both pretty tired after the early start having slept on the train so spent the evening in the hostel with a DVD and our books. The following ... read more
March 20th 2009
Xi'an is lovely and our hostel is really great, its in a very traditional building and has a terracotta themed bar in the basement where we have met lots of great people. the first day we arrived in the afternoon and dumped our stuff and went to the cafe for some food and to claim our free welcome coffee, we met a french guy and a swiss guy who had just arrived too from mongolia. we all went out for a wander around the main tourist points in xi'an city, the bell tower, the drum tower and the muslim quarter. We saw some traditional shows in both towers with peope in tradtional dress playing the bells and the drums funnily enough! in the muslim quarter there were lots of people with kites and lots of street ... read more
March 15th 2009
we arrived in chengdu and someone from our hostel met us at the train station and got us a taxi which the hostel paid for, this seemed a bit crazy to us but whatever. the hostel was really nice and relaxed and had a reasonably priced tour to the panda reseach base leaving the next morning so we booked on. the panda's were really cute and we were lucky to be there in the morning when they were feeding the young panda's and the kindergarten area was really active. the staff were helping the pandas to do forward rolls and one of them fell down the ditch between the tourists and the pandas. We spent a couple of hours there and saw fully grown pandas and red pandas before going back to see more of the ... read more
March 11th 2009
Yesterday we took a daytrip tour to the rice fields on the dragons backbone mountain range, ping'an and a local minority village where we saw a show of local dancing and the marriage ceremony, our guide was very funny and gave lots of information in chinese and english which was brilliant as we only paid for the local guide who we were told had no english, he told us countless times not to get lost as the bus would not wait for us and we would have to get the local bus back to guilin! In the minority village bum pinching is a way to show affection to anyone so all the locals where pinching everybodys bum and if you pinched back it meant you wanted to stay the night at the village, the women here ... read more
March 7th 2009
It started to dawn on us that 5 weeks is not long considering the ground we have to cover in that time although discussing this at dinner one night we were quickly cut off by an older american couple who reminded us that most people only have a couple of weeks! nevertheless time is running short... we crossed the border into china in the middle of the night and as the only two people on the train we were outnumbered by train attendants! the border patrol guards were friendly and everything went smoothly, well pretty much everything. we had heard stories of lonely planet china being confiscated at the border due to some controversial issue surrounding taiwan and it being marked as a seperate country on the map when it is under chinese rule, this map ... read more
February 24th 2009
Hanoi Having arrived tired along with our fellow western travellers we shared a taxi into the centre of Hanoi. The first thing that struck us was the amount of motorbikes and the crazy driving that seemed to be undertaken by everyone on the road, including the taxi. I always thought that there were some pretty risky drivers in the UK, but they don't even come close to this! We were dropped off with directions from a friendly hostel as to where our hotel was and tried to find it, eventually we conceeded that we weren't too sure where we were going so popped into a nearby hotel to try and find some help. The doorman left his post and walked us almost to the door of our hotel. It was very nice to be presented ... read more
Tot: 0.121s; Tpl: 0.006s; cc: 14; qc: 76; dbt: 0.0267s; 1; s:apollo w:www (50.28.60.10); sld: 2; ; mem: 6.5mb
© 2013 TravelBlog.org & Bloggers