KatieMac88

Sunday 11th December – Wednesday 14th December After another early morning start it was time to fly the 2 hours further North east to Beijing. I slept the whole duration of the flight, very unusual for me, but w had been on the move constantly for 3 weeks now and exhaustion was kicking in! We had opted to save ourselves a bit of money and fly in to Beijing Military Airport, rather than the main International. We had read that the military base was completely secluded, and although closer to the City, there was often a lack of taxis…hopefully we wouldn’t be stranded armed with our hotel name in Mandarin once again we hoped for the best with a taxi ride into the City! Thankfully there wasn’t a problem, with lots of taxis on offer and ... read more

Monday 6th December– Friday 9th December We arrived to a cold Shanghai with immediate problems – our taxi driver didn’t understand the English address of the hostel we had written down, so dropped us off where I guess he thought it might be near! We then tried asking several people for directions but it was clearly obvious that the language barrier was going to be a big problem in China! A tip we were given too late, was to always ask someone working at your arrival airport to translate any addresses into Chinese. We still hadn’t got used to carrying our backpacks and other luggage and were completely out of ideas, stuck in the middle of this very foreign City when a woman speaking a little English eventually managed to point us in the right direction. ... read more

Thursday 24th – Tuesday 29th November After seeing the Taj Mahal, it was time for us to move further south to Goa. After having some breakfast we were faced with re-packing our backpacks for the first time…not an easy job! It took forever for us both to get everything back in the backpacks and we hadn’t even unpacked properly. We ended up with a lot more belongings in our hand luggage & were completely exhausted by the time our taxi picked us up to take us to the airport…I would definitely have to get better at this! The roads in Delhi never got any easier…we knew what to expect by now, but it certainly didn’t make the journey any less tense! Everything is segregated by gender in India…I learnt this after having people shouting and waving ... read more

After 7 and a half hours and a sleepless plane journey through the night, we arrived at our first point of call - New Delhi, India. Lauren has family in Southern India, however neither of us had been to the country before, and we had both prepared ourselves for the undoubtedly large culture shock that was awaiting us. We were not naive and knew that we were throwing ourselves in the deep end by heading to India first. We had therefore pre-booked all of our accommodation and had arranged for hotel staff to pick us up from the airport. The drive from the airport back to our hotel in central New Delhi was an experience in itself. With no seat belts in the back of the car I can safely say it was the scariest car ... read more