Japan to London - Overland: Part 2 - 中国 Middle Kingdom

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More belated photos that have been rediscovered from the many memory cards and cds wedged under my bed.

For those of you who had noted the missing trip between South Korea and Mongolia: no I don't not fly, and I didn't hitchhike through North Korea either, as pleasant as it sounds. I did in fact touch touch in Qindao by taking the weidong ferry from Incheon near Seoul.

As I have forgotton much of the details of the journey I will try and consult the diary I was keeping at the time and try and find an opportunity to update this blig with some more detail. But in the mean time, for those of you who might be following this trip as a way to do it yourself i will give you the details on how to do it. Its easy.

I got the Weidong http://www.weidong.com/ ferry which you pay for on arrival but can be booked through there website. I forget exactaly how much it cost but it was in the region of 100,000Korean Won (£55 or a few more dollars) and was fairly pleasant and uneventful. For economy class you get a bed you share with four to eight other people and you arrive in Qindao in the mid morning to a very quiet ferry terminal - much less drama than getting the plane, much cheaper and you get to kick it with loads of Chinese families.

So anyway, off I went to China, purposely planning to miss the Olympics, but I arrived to a spruced up and shammied Qingdao and on to a bizarre post Olympic Beijing.

Here I would board the train of the Trans-Mongolian railway. The first on my Westbound journey on the longest railway in the world. The Trans-Siberian.

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Photos

Mao and Lion
Forbidden City

Toilet Reading
Slightly worrying

Chinese High Speed Trains
Beijing