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Kate Wall
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Travel Blog Posts
March 12th 2006
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 as far as I can judge is just the way a city should be; clean, efficient, friendly, well organised and with trains that actually run on time! Tokyo is a great city, yes we are ... read more
February 23rd 2006
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 we've had a lot to get through. We first visited the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square and then we moved on to the Temple of Heaven, the Summer Palace, Dongyue temple and of course the ... read more
February 23rd 2006
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 bear whilst my hands and feet turned to blocks of ice and we also had a stroll around what we think may have been Inner Mongolia! Check out some pictures below and don't be fooled ... read more
February 14th 2006
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 he would be the one to get the commission. We managed to lose him down a sidestreet and ended up just making it to the Tian Yuan Kui guesthouse alone! We spent a day browsing ... read more
February 14th 2006
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 we shrug and carry on. We manage to shake off all the others (we aren't staying the night, we've already book an hotel!) then just before we go inside, intersception! We are rumbled. We manage ... read more
February 11th 2006
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 visiting if only for the Ancestor Worshipping Temple which is a large cave carved around AD 672 with a massive seated budda. We had a peaceful 2 hours stroll along the river and I had ... read more
February 10th 2006
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 is a pagoda forest which we wandered around for a while but the highlight of the visit was definitely the Kung Fu show put on by students of the academy. Children as young as eight ... read more
February 7th 2006
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 the architecture feels much more traditional Chinese in design. We only had 2 days to explore and, judging by the photos, we seem to have spent most of the time eating! We also saw a ... read more
February 7th 2006
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 Hall which is a monument to the invasion from the Japanese during the second world war. The city lost 300,000 civilians during months of brutal fighting and the photos and displays in the hall are ... read more
January 29th 2006
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; dorms... They are by far the cheapest way for travellers to have a room for the night but done at the risk of having to share it with some noisy, messy, snoring hippie with greasy ... read more
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