Blogs from China, Asia - page 2311

We then all spent the next few days heading up to Everest driving through the Tibetan Plateau, principally along the Friendship Highway, passing stunning scenary including the ice blue colours of Yam Tso Lake and the towns of Gyantse, Shigatse and a detour to Sakya, all with their respective monasteries. These were very bumpy drives in four wheel drives that were quite old and rickety and due to the conditions, just driving over mountains, we had lots of punctures and stops to pick up fellow stranded travellers, amoungst them some very annoying belgiums...grrrr (that is not Molly and Kristoph from our group)! Overall, the views were stunning and inspiring... Our tour guide Gopal did very well to keep our drivers motivated (they kept on wanting to take us down closed army roads so they wouldn't have ... read more

This entry is dedicated to Suzanne (the boss lady/supervisor/awesome friend). Suzanne told me that I had to do her a favor when I go to China and that is to visit the Terracotta warriors which is based in Xi’an. She inspired me to go! I went with my roommates, Trey and Jenny, and a translator, Anita. We took a train Friday night and arrived in Xi’an the next morning. The train ride was a sleeper and it was a 12 hour ride. Right when we got off the train, the tour started. The tour ended on Sunday evening. We took a train back to Beijing (another 12 hour ride). Right when we got off the train we had to go straight to our 8 o’clock morning class. The tour was a lot of fun and here ... read more

A few more pictures for your enjoyment while I still have access to the internet, it pays to stay at a nice hotel, bargain for only 65 quid a night for a 5 star. We've not been too lucky here in Beijing, as with most of China, the place is in the midst of a massive building program. This also seems to be including most of the famous sights in Beijing, they are all being restored, I expect in time for 2008. We went to the Temple of Heaven, it was covered in scaffolding, then to the Summer Palace, yes you guessed, scaffolding. Then I went around the Forbidden City this afternoon, only to find half of it in scaffolding. At least Tian'an men square (shame about's Mao's mole) was finished and we found a rather ... read more

Ok, a recap of the past week. Chongqing, although a big city was great! We upgraded our room to stay right downtown in a Chinese business hotel that was very nice, although the breakfast included was a bit unusual, but we are getting use to noodles and dumplings for any meal. We spent 3 days there, one day just walking around the old city Citapol or something like that, I don't have our book with us. The city is amazing as the estimates are 3-8 million, and tons of destruction. Somewhat similar to Shanghai but not as far along in its rebuilding, so there is an odd mix of the very old with the very new. We spent one day at Dazu caves. That was an amazing place. It was a Sunday and we went out ... read more

Well this was proably the best day of monastery visists I have ever had....we were very fortunate that at Deprung we were able to see the monks chanting, sharing yak butter tea (which stinks and makes you want to gag immediatley) and also reading from their paper thin prayer books. This one has the largest amount of practising monks in Tibet about 700. In Sera monastery (500 monks), we were able to go into a massive courtyard and see monks debating with each other, generally they did it in pairs, one sitting down asking the questions and the other standing up answering them and for a finale they do a big clap (a sort of hong kong fuey chop) hence the pictures will look a little strange, but it was fabulous!! The following day the group ... read more