We had a good journey from Guilin to Hanoi and were very relieved that our train tickets (that looked nothing like a train ticket and was, strangely, in Russian!) turned out to be real. We shared our cabin with a really interesting guy who had been working as a cameraman in the desert North of Beijing and in Shanghai filming 'The Mummy III'. We passed a very pleasant evening looking at his photo's of Jet Li - pretty cool! We went through the Chinese border at 1....

Despite knowing we were coming at completely the wrong time of year for the good views of the Li River that we came here for we're really glad we came anyway! We had a rather stressful couple of hours in Shenzhen train station (the border town with Hong Kong). Firstly, despite having now been officially part of China for over ten years the border was one of the most strict we have been through so far. Graham got searched, had our food for the train confiscated a...

Hong Kong is mental! It's busy, it's crowded, it's nice and warm and it's steep (in terms of both landscape and money!). It's a city of contrasts. Streets that could have been in any part of China we've been to already - street vendors, wooden buildings, tin roof's - literally underneath some of the tallest skyscrapers in the world, full of millionaire businessmen who come trotting out in their designer suits to scoff their lunches in some of the priciest restaur...

Our last few days in Japan have been a whistlestop tour of the last few places we wanted to go - we're definitely getting the most out of our rail passes! Back in Kyoto we did the rounds of a few more temples and castles and palaces . . . and came to the conclusion that we definitely are templed-out! Graham was very disappointed by the castle in Kyoto - no arrow holes to shoot people out of, no slots to drop boiling water on people and no drawbridge - what kind ...

In order to break up the train journey back to Kyoto we stopped off for a night and a whistle-stop tour of Tsuwano. It was a charming little place. In the few hours we had we got round it's few little sights - a single chair chairlift up to the castle ruins, a relatively large shrine for such a small place and enormous koi carp swimming around the drainage ditches . . . ! Someone had even, quite thoughtfully, put on a play for us. The young kids seemed to love ...