ScottAndJoy

Ye-ha, we board another overnight train to Suzhou. The enthusiasm has waned a little but we've come prepared. Armed with weird little butter filled coffee cakes, the packet looked like chocolate and custard to me, and bread with an unfathomable number of preservatives, we set off. We pass smoke stack after smoke stack...perhaps Mr Abbott should have ridden an overnight train in China, and press on. Day 7 A slight hurdle, our train terminates in Shanghai and we have to get off 80km before this in Suzhou. No English here, not a single word. And for some reason when they say Soo-chow its fine but when I say Soo-chow, I get a look of puzzlement. We wake the kids and wait and wait and wait, carefully decifer every station sign until we finally reach Suzhou. Shiny ... read more

Beijing...the city of 20 million people and I think we've seen them all! There are just so many people wherever you go, the whole place is buzzing. But its not as bad as you'd think and the girls have coped remarkably well. People told me that in Beijing, you can't see the sky. I thought....yeah right, surely you just look up and there it is. You know if its cloudy, you know if its sunny. But you can't, seriously you can't see more than about half a km in any direction and that includes up. The first day, I just coughed as the air just made you do that. The hotels provide elaborate filter masks, the kind you see in the movies when they're trying to stop the spread of the abola virus, just in case ... read more

Just a very quick blog to let you all know I made it safely back to Kathmandu. I've got one more night here and then I'm heading back to Oz to my 2 beautiful girls!! Unfortunately I've run out of cash and my attempt to access more money from the ATM failed so I have about $4 left to keep me going till I leave in 24hrs...hopefully I don't have to resort to begging on the street. Last night was very scary - during the day I was feeling really tired and weak and was generally feeling quite dazed. As the day went on I got worse and worse and by dinner time I could barely speak. We were having our final group celebration dinner but I couldn't even concentrate on listening to conversation much less ... read more

Well after a very long walk uphill we've made it to Namche at an altitude of 3445m. I still haven't seen any Himalayan peaks as it's been cloudy and rainy the last few days but the scenery at ground level is still really nice. We followed a raging river the first couple of days that originates at Mt Everest. Today we had a "rest" day at Namche which involved a walk 400m to the Everest View Hotel which unfortunately today was the white cloud view hotel. it's at 3880m so its now the highest I've ever been and thankfully so far I don't have any signs of altitude sickness - only a slight headache this morning but a litre of water seemed to fix it. Namche is amazing - there's dozens of internet cafe's, bakeries, pool ... read more