Our final day in China, so after a morning of packing we flew to Tokyo in the afternoon. The flight consisted of a transfer in Shanghai, which neither of us have encounted before. It was similar to a cattle market where we were split off from the main group and left in a holding area. Before being checked and signed out of the country in order to proceed back to the plane we just got off of! So to sum up China: Pros - Panda day! - Yangshuo - loved the hotel, ...

Our final full day in Beijing was an early start to see Tiananmen square, Forbidden city, Jingshaw park and the Hutong area. The square holds about 1/2 million people and on the 1st October each year they celebrate the national day of the People's Rebublic of China, in prepartion for this they were building a huge basket of flowers in the centre. There is a main road between Tiananmen square and the Forbidden city which surprised me as I had not noticed this in p...

Today marks the day of seeing our 2nd wonder of the world, having already seen the Terracotta warriors the great wall was next. We rose at the relatively late time of 9am, a rare lie in for us. Our tour has given us little leisure time and we found ourselves exhausted but excited. A 2 hour drive to the wall meant venturing into the countryside. I was surprised to find that despite the complete change in scenery we were in fact still in Beijing. Strange if you con...

We had our first experience of sleeping on a train...it was noisy, had a smelly toilet, hard bed and a driver that liked to slam on the brakes through out the night, almost rolling me out of the top bunk! We did however meet a funny australian couple in the next room who could relate to the experiences and cultural differences we had encounted. The train arrived over an hour late in to Beijing, it would seem none of our transport has departed/arrived at the cor...

After a restless nights sleep in Xi'an, in a bed which can only be described as a cyropractors dream. We took the glass lift to attend another classic chinese take on the English menu. Brown bacon and anemic sausages were part of the buffet menu next to the rice grule and steamed buns. The Chinese really do not understand breakfast, it's almost as if it is a nasty inconvience that must be taken care of before the day can continue. Needless to say I stuck with toa...