One night in Shanghai - well 2 really - but a glitzy style town - with so much building going on the only place to visit was the metropolitan town planning centre - which was a full building to itself. Shanghai is hosting Expo 2010, its building 10 new cities/zones, new airport, cleaning up the river, developing Patong - it goes on. However underneath it all - although Shanghai has been an international centre for 100 years or more - its more chinese than Beiji...

The Great Great Wall of China - was Great.We had booked on a trip - but it was more of a taxi ride with entry fees paid for us - which picked us up at 7am. LM had not been very well the past few days with a bad cough and cold, and we had been a bit doubtful about doing this trip as it was 10k walking. So we left him asleep as we got on the mini bus in his pj's and got a few funny looks from the other tourists - and words of warning from the chinese about the terr...

Bit of a lie in this morning and got off to the Forbidden City finally at 12pm. Again it was huge, and we hadn't really allowed enough time to have a good look round. Much of our time was taken up with posing for photographs for all the Chinese tourists who were queueing up to touch the golden children. We got a auto guide which really just read out the info on the boards that were around the palace. One or two interesting facts - the palace has more or less ...

Beijing is huge - everything is big - and new. And old. 1st stop was the Temple of Heaven via the bus. A huge garden with various Temples in where the Emperor would go to sacrifice a calf for a good harvest. There were a few areas where the acoustics were interesting - whispering on the circular wall. We acquired another chinese friend who - unlike everyone else thought he had to make friends with us in order to take a photo. He followed us for 30 minutes b...

Hadn't really expected to do a blog from here - but this is how it goes. Left the cruise boat at 8pm slightly behind scheduled and piled on to a bus to Yichang 30km away. Went through enormous tunnels of at least 8km long through the mountain sides. Our guide had promised to help us get on a bus to Wuhan when we arrived and so we thought we would be travelling with Mike and Pam for the next 5 hours or so. The plan was to get to Wuhan and see if we could get o...