The morning we left Shanghai we were woken by the sound of beating drums and shouting right outside our window. Thinking that it may be a demonstration we looked out to see thousands of runners beneath our window. It was the Shanghai Marathon, which began at the Bund, and then proceeded down East Nanjing Street towards Peoples Square and then away from the city area. Thankfully they had long gone by the time we left to go to the train station. A long train trip - seven and half hour hours - followed. The scenery became more interesting the closer we got to our destination of Quanzhou in Fujian Province. We passed by (and sometimes through via long tunnels) continuos low mountains densely covered with bamboo. We were travelling on a high speed train (260 klms ... read more

In the middle of the night in Shanghai and refusing to pay double the price for our cancelled hotel room booking meant we had to find somewhere nearby to sleep. We were close to East Nanjing Road which is the wide pedestrian mall which leads down to the Bund so I left Jerry with the bags and set off to find a room. Turned away from a couple that were full I eventually found a small room in a very Chinese budget hotel. It was clean, though we had to go through a maze of corridors to get to it, but it gave us a bed for the night. Next morning though we ended up finding a comfortable room in the Jinjiang Hotel in East Nanjing Road. We bought the Jinjiang hotel chain discount card to ... read more

We woke to sunshine and blue skies on our first morning in Datong. Buffet breakfast was a surprise - absolutely everything you could imagine including endless cappucinnos - a lovely way to start the day. We had been planning on catching a bus out to the grottoes - we knew we would have to hire a driver to take us to the Hanging Monastery a it was 70 kilometres from the city but after talking to the staff at the hotel they suggested that we visited both together next day in a taxi which would then take us to the airport (nearly an hour out of the city) for our 7.30pm flight to Shanghai. We decided to follow their advice so once the transport was arranged for the following day we set out to explore. It ... read more

Our third day in Beijing and Jerry and I parted way for the day. I was planning a day indoors at a mall - not to shop but to escape the smog and give my lungs a chance to recuperate - and Jerry was heading out of the city to spend the day at the Chinese Aviation Museum. First though I wanted to visit a small shop I had read about which uses pieces of porcelain from dishes smashed during the Cultural Revolution and sets them into tiny boxes. Of course it took much longer than I expected to get there and after many locals kept giving me directions which contradicted each other a kind man eventually led me down a street and pointed at the street sign I had been looking for - impossible to ... read more

During the first 24 hours in Hanoi we booked our trip to Ha Giang province and got our bearings one again around the streets of the old town. We arrived around lunchtime after a two and half hour flight from Kaohsuing and caught a taxi into the city. We were in Hanoi last year but didn't even notice the long colourful mosaic wall which lines the highway into the old town. It is four kilometers in length and highlights the culture and history of the country in a brightly coloured mosaic tile banner. We were welcomed warmly at the Hanoi Guest house (we stayed there last year) and after dumping our bags set out to rediscover the chaos which is Hanoi old town. Of course we got totally lost - we were trying to find Hoan ... read more