Blogs from Asia - page 14693

This is the Eggs, coming to you from somewhere on a train track, vaguely near Shanghai......... Typhoon Chanchu didn’t really affect us after all and we were able to check out of our hotel yesterday as planned, and take ourselves down to Kowloon’s ‘Hung Hom’ station in Hong Kong to catch the 15:00 hrs K100 train to Shanghai. We were particularly pleased that the arrangements hadn’t changed because this route is only serviced once every two days and it would have been a bit of a palaver to hang around in the peeing rain & driving wind in Honkers for another 48 hours (but not that much of a palaver if we are completely honest). The taxi from our hotel to the station was supposed to be 32 HK dollars however the driver fleeced us for ... read more

We got to Xi'an in the early morning. Fortunately for us, someone who worked at our previous guesthouse in Pingyao was on our train so we shared a taxi with him to the Bell Tower Hostel where we were staying. While the hostel was not terrible, it won't go down as one of our favorites of the trip. After resting a bit, we went out to explore the town. Side rant about Rough Guide At this point, I (Mike) just want to point out how much I hate the Rough Guide guide book we are using for China. Once again, the map was not helpful in getting to a restaurant we were trying to find. I have been a devoted Lonely Planet follower for years. We decided on Rough guide as it was published in November ... read more

Ok this is ridiculous. I've done the south of Vietnam and loved it. But I've allready been to Hoi An on my first visit to the country. This is where I had my suit tailored. And now I went ahead and got a shirt and a couple pairs of shorts made. It's so cheap you just get sucked right into it. I'm going to breeze north to Hanoi and fly somewhere. It seems I'm getting a bit southeast asia-ed out. It's great but at the same time I'm totally sick of people thinking I'm a walking ATM. You can't go anywhere without saying, "No thank you" a dozen times. It's getting hard to be polite. I yelled at someone for the first time on my travels. I agreed on a price with a driver and then ... read more

HMS Prince of Wales (Battleship, 1941-1941) HMS Prince of Wales, a 35,000-ton King George V class battleship built Birkenhead, England, was completed in March 1941. In late May, while still not fully operational, she was sent into action with the German battleship Bismarck and received significant damage from heavy gunfire. Following repairs, Prince of Wales carried Prime Minister Winston Churchill across the Atlantic to Newfoundland. There, on 9-12 August, Churchill joined U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt for the Atlantic Charter conference, the first meeting between the two English-speaking leaders of what was emerging as the "Grand Alliance" against the Axis powers. Following her return to British waters, Prince of Wales went to the Mediterranean, where she successfully engaged Italian planes off Malta in late September. Sent to the Far East with the battle cruiser HMS Repulse ... read more

Dive No. 5 - 17/05/06 - HMS Prince of Wales - Depth 58.8m Time 98-min - The SCS Trip I always intended getting down to this wreck, just to say I’d done it. As it happened it turned out to be the best dive I’ve ever done and also the deepest. Prior to the dive Jack gave us the practical dive planning lecture and we calculated our dive plan. Once again Jack led the dive down the shot line towards the stern or the up turned wreck. The shot line was fastened to inner most propshaft but fixed to the shot line by the wreck was the British Ensign which was tangled around the line. Jack took us around the 3 remaining propellers and ruder then to the area where the 4th propeller had broken its ... read more