Well, my travel plans are all complete now. I am spending this week end in Datong and on Tuesday I fly to Kunming and take the afternoon bus to a place called Dali. From there I go on to Lijiang and Tiger Leaping Gorge, then on the 1st September I fly to Lhasa and, after 4 days in Lhasa, I take the train back to Beijing in time to get the train for Moscow and home!! On Thursday I hired a bike and spent part of the afternoon cycling around the lake and hutongs, (...

Well, things are moving quickly. I've got BOTH visas and have thus been able to plan the remainder of my travels. The Russians tried a final act of sabotage (and no, I'm not becoming paranoid!) when I went to collect my visa. They decided that they did want to see my rail tickets after all. But I was on to them and produced the tickets in a flash, so they were forced to concede and hand over the visa! The Mongolians were as helpful, friendly and unobstructive as ...

I'm back in baking old Beijing. I got back last Friday after a journey that lasted 15 hours. First there was the bus to Haikou through a quite mountainous and thickly wooded interior, which was, at one time, virgin rain forest but has now been largely cultivated and built on. Heavy rain in Haikou meant that, once again, no taxis were available so I ended up on the back of a motorbike rickshaw, buried under my mountain of luggage. Quite how the motorbike made it a...

So, I'm in the beautiful seaside resort of Sanya at the southern-most tip of China. Well, the resort itself is not especially beautiful. It calls itself the 'Hawaii of China' but it's more Miami than Hawaii, with lots of high rises and the inevitable construction work going on everywhere. The beach is a glorious sweep of golden sand, lapped by the blue, tepid (and possibly limpid) South China Sea. It is ferociously (??) hot but there are coolish sea breezes and t...

By 11 pm last Saturday I managed to find a hotel, with a bath no less! Nothing like total immersion when one hasn't washed for a few days. The next day (Sunday)was a day of rest. I could hardly move. Even stepping off the pavement was painful but by Monday I'd recovered and went to see the Stone Forest, at Shilin, about 120 kms outside Kunming. I had to procure yet another expensive taxi because the buses were too complicated. The Stone Forest is a huge area of ...