Our only two reasons for being in Taiyuan were to visit Pingyao, a town almost entirely still as it was a century ago, and the Shanxi Museum, listed as one of the best for English tourists in China. Therefore our first job was to secure our onward journey. One of the biggest headaches in China is that you can only buy train tickets from the station you are at so by the time you arrive and try and buy your onward ticket the trains have already been sold out. This ...

On our last day in Beijing we wanted to have a look round the Summer Palace. We checked out, put our bags into storage behind reception at the hostel and headed out to the metro, crossing Beijing then hopping into a taxi for our final leg out there. The Summer Palace, we soon discovered, is less a Palace than an enormous area of Gardens, Temples and lakes the size of a small town. We wandered Longevity Hill by the entrance and looked in on halls and gardens dedi...

After the trek on the wall we rewarded ourselves with a bit of a lie-in and rose at 10 to try and organise our onward travel. We'd been told by our hostel reception that the train down to Taiyuan was already full until after the weekend but that if we wanted the bus instead we could just turn up at the bus station and jump on the next one without a problem. We decided to pop down the tourist information office just to check this was true. Now this should have be...

The day began as an early start, we had chosen to travel a bit further away from the usual tourist areas of the wall to do a 10.5 km hike along a slightly more remote section. Our 4 hour bus journey started at 6.30 in the morning so we were a bit bleary-eyed as we set out but by the time we arrived the 30 or so of us on the bus were ready to take on the wall. As a brief history the first wall was unified in the reign of the first Emperor of the whole of China o...

This is very much a retrospective entry as I'm struggling to keep the blog up, think I'm going to end up writing about most of China from Australia when I get there! After my slightly unorthodox first day in Shanghai I spent the second day shopping for a camera then hopped on an overnight train up to Beijing. I shared my carriage with a man whose snoring could put the other giants in the BFG to shame but arrived in Beijing running high on adrenaline. After brie...