Japan - 2nd March 06 OK, I know what you're thinking; send Kate away to Asia for 8 months and all she does is take pictures of bloody trains! I do have a good reason though, we have arrived in Japan and this is one of the famous Shinkansen (bullet train) that whisked us across the country at about 300KPH! Pretty special :) Anyway, other than getting excited about fast train travel you might wander what else we've been up to since we arrived in the Land of the Rising Sun. We started in Tokyo, touching down to a city that [View Full Entry]

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Beijing - 19.02.06 It is my last day in China today and it is with mixed emotions that I leave the place I have called home for the last five months. It is definitely sad and strange to be leaving, especially as we have so little travelling time left now. It seems fitting that we end our Chinese adventures in Beijing; the nations capital and our host for the past 10 days. Beijing has been fun, it has alot to offer visitors and seems to be somewhere where it would be possible to spend some real time. It's been busy as [View Full Entry]

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Datong - 17.02.06 We planned to stay 4 days in Datong but quickly cut it down to 2 once we'd experienced the bitter wind nearly taking our faces off! Our 2 must-sees were the Yungang Caves, which while being similar to the Longmen caves were still a fantastic sight and the Hanging monastry which is built into a cliff face where it has withstood the forces of gravity for nearly 1400 years. The Yungang Caves, though not in as scenic location as the Longmen caves are equally, if not more so, impressive. We walked around for as long as we could [View Full Entry]

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Pingyao - 13.02.06 Pingyao is a small tourist-orientated destination offering a couple of streets of souvenirs, western food and a pleasant atmosphere. We stayed overnight at at one of the nicest hotels we've been in yet. Good food (western and chinese!), lovely and very helpful staff, cool chinese style room and free internet! The competition for business is fierce and we had a battle to get through all the touts at the station - one of whom got into our taxi with us! We got rid of her but then had to deal with the smiley taxi driver who was determined [View Full Entry]

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Xi'an - 11.02.06 Arriving in Xi'an was a bit of a drama! We are now firmly in tourist town and don't we know it when the hotel touts are actually meeting us ON the train! Unfortunately he was for the hotel we had chosen so we found it hard to shake him off until a suited man, who we assume was an undercover policeman, flashes his card at him, shouts in chinese and takes him away. We are tired, we haven't slept very well and we've been away long enough that all this warrants is a bat of an eyelid before [View Full Entry]

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Luoyang - 10.02.06 The 10th Feb was a pretty hectic day. Not only did we visit the Shaolin temple (previous entry) we also just managed to get a bus to Luoyang - over an hour away - and visit the Longmen caves before catching a midnight train to Xi'an. The Longmen caves are over 100,000 images and statues of the budda carved into the cliffs by the Yi River. Some are straight onto the cliff face and others are in little grottos. Many of the buddas have been partly destroyed over the years (souvenir hunters apparently) but it is still worth [View Full Entry]

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Shaolin Temple - 10.02.06 Shaolin Si is a Buddist temple in the area of the Song Shan mountain range. It is famous for being the place where Kung Fu was invented so we had to make a brief stop here on our way through to Xi'an. Without going into any boring details it was a bit of a drama to get there/get in (partly but not entirely our own fault) but in the end it was worth all the hassle. The temple itself is a fairly standard one as buddist temples go (we have seen many, many temples now!) and there [View Full Entry]

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Nanjing - 01.02.06 We arrived in Nanjing, a city 3 hours west of Shanghai, in style by travelling on our first double decker train! Choo Choo!! One of the first things we did was visit the PSB to extend our visas, unfortunately we discovered that it would take them almost a week to do this here (think there was a delay due to holidays for the Chinese New Year) so we found ourselves wth some time relax and get to know Nanjing a little better. We wandered for a few days, saw the city wall and visited the Nanjing Massacre Memorial [View Full Entry]

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Kaifeng - 7.02.06 After all our recent time in modern Chinese cities, we wanted our next stop to be something a bit different. We decided on Kaifeng, a much less developed place where skyscrapers are banned for fear of destroying the old city that lies beneath it meaning that it has managed to escape much of the industrialisation of modern China. You can feel the difference as soon as you arrive. The atmosphere is more hustle and bustle than fast paced city life and there are many more bicycles and pedlos on the road than we've been used to recently. Also [View Full Entry]

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Shanghai - 27.01.06 It was an exciting moment to arrive in Shanghai, the largest city in China and known far and wide as 'the whore of the orient.' What better place to spend Chinese New Year, the biggest festival in the Chinese calendar welcoming in the year of the dog. We hit a slight problem though when we realised that we couldn't actually afford to stay anywhere! All the hotels were far too expensive especially considering that we wanted to spend a week exploring the city. This meant our only remaining option was one I had been pretty reluctant to try; [View Full Entry]

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