Another must-see place near Guilin is the Longji Dragon’s Backbone rice terraces. Again, we were taunted with incredible iconic images of blood-red sunrises/sunsets reflecting off the amazing curves of water-filled rice terraces. One of the drawbacks of long-term travel is that you can’t always choose to be everywhere at the best time of year for weather or photography. This also illustrates the difference between 'travel photography' and 'taking photos while travelling'. In both cases you want to get the best images you can under the circumstances, but good travel photographers time their visits to give themselves the best chance to succeed. Since we really belong to the second group we’ll have to settle for the old “win some, lose some” philosophy. In December the terraces are not at their best as they are past the golden ... read more

We had a few reasons for going to Hong Kong, one reason was because we had to leave China to re-set our visas. Our visas allowed 2 entries for 3 months each, so in order to stay for four months it meant leaving and then returning for our second entry. Wow, I can't believe it's that time already. Things are going so fast. We both had some things in mind that we'd been looking forward to on the shopping front. Jordan's shoes have been falling apart for the last couple of months and desperately needed replacing. Kathie had her eyes on some new trousers from Marks & Spencer. Pretty boring actually compared to what most people come here to shop for. There were camera shops everywhere tempting us with the latest and greatest models. Not to ... read more

We arrived in Xiamen after an incredibly long 21 hour train ride. It seemed like we would never arrive. Once we did arrive, we were shocked by the giant WalMart and McDonalds just outside the train station. We had foolishly expected Xiamen to be a bit of smaller city of approximately 500,000 or so. Uhh... not so, we would guess the population to be closer to 2 million-ish. Gulang Yu is an island off of the coast of Xiamen; it took us about 10 minutes to get there by ferry. Thank goodness we had taken the initiative to get our previous hotel manager to write out the chinese address of this hotel on a piece of paper. This way we were able to show it around when asking for directions, as there was absolutely no way ... read more

Travelling between Shanghai, Suzhou and Hangzhou gave us the chance to experience some of China's newest and fastest high speed trains. On our way to Suzhou we were so impressed to hit 250 kph that we took a photo of the speed indicator. On the way to Hangzhou on the newest line that only opened about a month ago, that photo we took of our top speed looked absolutely silly as our speed zoomed past the 250 mark and eventually maxed out at 353 kph. Even more impressive than the speed of the train is that it only took 20 months to build the 202 km line. China currently has the World's longest high-speed rail network and it's only getting longer and faster as the 1318 km Beijing - Shanghai line is scheduled to open in ... read more

Since we found that 6 nights in Beijing was too much big city time for us, we decided to only spend 2 nights in Shanghai. The weather during the day was overcast and misty, not great for photos, so we spent most of our days in cafes drinking coffee. After a brief encounter with Jackie Chan in the Jinmao Tower, we decided to fork out the 150 yuan each and go up to the 100th floor of the Shanghai World Financial Centre - the World's highest viewing platform. We were a bit early going up, but we really wanted to see the city light up at night from the top floor. Once we were up there, we discovered that they won't let you back up to the top on the same ticket if you decided to ... read more