6 hours on a bus. 1 border crossing. 0 Singapore dollars. We find ourselves in Southeast Asia’s richest country, Singapore, or Singapura, the Lion City. The border crossing for Singapore was easy, bus across, the bus stops, you go through customs, and you get back on the bus. Done. Found our guesthouse quite early and were given two beds in a 28 bed dorm... with only two other people in it. It was a pretty shabby place considering the price we were paying (way too much). Ahh well such is the life of a backpacker. We had such big elaborate plans for Singapore, but the cost of the city was a bit extreme coming from the much less expensive countries in Southeast Asia. The newest hotspot on the touristy list of things to see was the ... read more

The train from Shanghai to Ji’nan was so fast!! We were at speeds of over 200km per hour at some points; we completed the journey of some 745km in less than 6 hours (with numerous stops on the way). The train ride was awesome. Arriving in Ji’nan was not so awesome. Neither of us has seen such pollution in our entire lives. It looked like just an overcast day from the window, but once you get out of the train the smell of smog in the air and the heaviness in your chest is almost unbearable. So we went straight to the ticketing office and managed to hand-sign our way into two tickets to Beijing the next day. We know that Beijing is just as polluted, but we had no real plans for Ji’nan other than ... read more

Population: approximately 15 million people and growing. We arrived in the bustling Shanghai south train station around 3pm and Scott’s chicken feet offering friend from the train offered... no, demanded, to help us find out way in the huge city. We hoped into a taxi with and his not so pleased looking wife and took off into the city. The chicken feet man called his daughter and had Scott talk her on the phone (ENGLISH!) while he talked to the driver in Chinese attempting to figure out where in the sprawling city our over-priced hotel room was. We eventually wound up at his hotel (funny enough we considered staying there), met his daughter, Scott went in with chicken feet and chicken feet jr to talk to reception and we were back on our way to our ... read more

Arriving in Yangshuo at 4:30 in the morning was quite an experience. The city was still dark from the night before, with only a handful of people out still roaming the streets, a few drunken tourists and some motorcycle taxi’s with no English speaking drivers. After 5 minutes of walking in the wrong direction and a drunk Russian woman telling us that we were going the wrong way, we came upon a looming figure in the dark off in the distance... it was one of the towering cliffs the city is so well known for, hovering some hundred feet above us like a dark gigantic ghost. 4:30 in the morning, our first mainland China destination, everything was quiet, nothing was open except for a McDonalds with a few other westerners arriving from a horribly early bus ... read more

The trip from Hue to Hanoi was the longest leg of our trip in Vietnam yet. We left Hue at 5 in the evening and arrived in Hanoi on the outskirts of town at 7 the next day. Our first day in Hanoi felt like a big whack of bad luck, Scott was still suffering from his issues that started before Dalat, it took us 2 hours of wandering around the old quarter of Hanoi with a map of the area that looked as if it were made for another country all together (none of the streets lined up or matched what the guidebook was saying), we had originally planned to purchase our Chinese visa’s in Hanoi, and tried to get US $’s for this, but no one would sell to us except some sketchy looking ... read more