After much ado we worked out how to spend out 'Tibetan time' as well as see a touch of Tibet while we are still here. Well at least we thought until our plan came tumbling down. We decided to catch a 10 hour train and then a 6 hour bus to a place called Xiahe. The day we were about to board the train what did the Chinese Govt. decide to do - close that town off to tourists too! So in a bit of a frantic mess we had to decide what to do with our time. We heade...

We made it..... Just arrived in Pingyao after out mammoth 12 hour train ride from Beijing. Ordinarily i like train rides but we couldn't get sleeper tickets so we had to go with the 'hard seat' option. We got to the train station with about 10 mins to spare and ran to our platform. Once we boarded the train we had a better idea of what we were in for. There were people everywhere - on seats, in the isles, on the floor ie you don't need a ticket to get a ride ...

Hi all, Internet is pretty slow around here and it has taken me ages to upload a few photos so this will be brief. Beijing is awesome. We went to the Great Wall which was absolutely spectacular. It just keeps going and going. We ate Peking Duck last night and it met all my expectations and more. Beijing is not as big as i imagined. It is a huge city in area but there are not many huge high rises like in Hong Kong. Traffic is made and construction is goi...

The sun is finally shining!!! We are back in thongs and shorts and i even got a little sun burn the other day. From Guilin we took a boat cruise down the Lijian River to the quite farming town of Yangshou. Being backpackers we decided to take the 'Chinese' boat that was almost half the price of the 'Western' boat. Lucky we did as we found out later that everything is the same except for the on-board commentary which wasn't that good anyway. So for 4 hours we cr...

The weather hasn't cleared up from the last blog entry so we didn't do a great deal of sight seeing done in Hong Kong. Considering we couldn't even see Hong Kong peak, or even the tops of some of the city skyscrappers for that matter, there wasn't much point in climbing the peak for that long awaited bird's eye view of the city so a post card will have to do. From Hong Kong we took a boat ride to Macau for a night. Macau is part of China but it is a Special...