19-04-08 is the date We just about managed to tear ourselves away from Beijing. I think that it is the best city I have visited thus far. ^these are a few things we have already encountered in china. 1. Everyone in china spits. The question is not whether to do it or not, it is how you should go about it. It seems old men like to make as much noise as possible wherever they are be it a bank or in the street. The chinese favourite is definately the snot rocket...

8th april arrived in Beijing with Sam at 5am just as it was starting to get light and hopped on a tube to our respective hostels. After arriving at our hostel, we hired bikes and boshed it down to the forbidden city and tian'anmen square. Neither of them really lived-up to expectations: the forbidden city (amazingly impressive though it is thinking about the story behind its construction) is just a series of seemingly endless corridors and huge squares with a fe...

one moment please

The train from Ulaan Bataar to the Monglian border town was very cheap(the equivilent of 3pound) and our third class cabin has a gang of mongolian children who roamed the carriages terrorising the other passangers. We were the only westerners as most travellers opt to take the through train which goes straight from capital to capital. We were travelling with Sam, (a 20 year old american who was now living in Tokyo) who is a great guy to travel with and as he spok...

We remained in Mongolia for nearly a week after returning from the Gobi. As we were unpacking the van after the trip we found to our disbelief that we were sharing a room with Dara the guy we had stayed with in Novosibirsk! The next few days were spent with him and others from the hostel, sampling mongolian cuisine purchasing magic cloth from the black market and watching the trick shot billiards world championships on some momgolian sport5s channel until the ear...