We continued our trip stopping at Erdene Zuu Khiid (Monastery) in Kharkhorin, Tsetserleg and Tsenkher Hot Springs. At our ger camp at the hot springs there was a large group of Mongolians on holiday with lots of children. A little boy burst into our ger one evening by accident, thinking it was his and he ran out giggling. Then for the next half a hour or so we had little children one at a time opening the door to look in at us thinking it was a great game! We th...

We set off on our 12 day trip in the Mongolian countryside on Tuesday morning and left paved roads almost as soon as we got out of Ulaanbaatar. We had Uugana our guide and Damda our driver to accompany us in a 4WD vehicle as you certainly wouldn't be able to navigate yourself. We were amazed as mud tracks weaved across wide open spaces of nothing criss-crossing with other mud tracks, that the driver knew where to go, without landmarks, signposts or GPS. We were t...

We stayed overnight in Beijing just so we could get the Trans-Mongolian Railway into Mongolia. We got the K23 train on Saturday morning, and were glad that it was a better standard than the overnight trains in Vietnam. We'd had to upgrade to a private 2 bed cabin as the others had all sold out and the cabin was clean and even had carpet on the floor. The scenery was green and mountainous as we left Beijing, gradually getting flatter and dryer as we neared the bor...

Hong Kong seemed such a modern city after some of the places we've been to recently. The public ransport system is great and it's so easy to get around and English is far more widely spoken than in the rest of China. Perhaps because of these things it means Hong Kong isn't quite as interesting as Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, for example we didn't see a single duck, chicken or pig on a motorbike, coming to think of it, there wern't many motorbikes! It is a nice sto...

First we arrived in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, so much quieter and less chaotic than the big cities of Vietnam. We didn't have much time but visited a few of the sights in the city, Wat Phnom, the National museum and the Royal Palace, seeing many landmine victims begging along the way. By far the most interesting places but also the most horrific were the Killing Fields and Prison S-21, but they are places that must be seen to try and understand what th...