so il start with a nice story. walking down the street in kaifeng the other day (notably the home of the jews in china) and saw a guy wearing a t shirt saying (in english -bizarrely) "keep the japs out". modern china- open to the world. no racism here folks! hey everyone. im in chonqing. i can see the yangste river from our hotel. a world away from the familiar Thames and as usual im a little homesick but we found a bookstore to replenish reading supplies at...

hello everyone still alive. tho nearly roasting in the heat. still cant get much on in the way of pics. il send a memory card home with chris and he can upload some. sorry! so we're in the hottest place in china. inexplicably a heat wave has descended on the province. 39 degrees plus. not getting a lot done today but the last week has been pretty cool. we did climb that mountain for sunrise. started at 11pm from the village of hua shan at its foot. climbed...

we're finally leaving xi'an today. we ended up staying here 4 nights and doing lots of stuff within shaanxi province from here as we had a nice cheap hotel room -less than 8 quid for a double ensuite with lovely air con!! and the hotel was a very comfortable place to be for a few nights too. plus a good restaurant with westernised chinese food went down well and an english menu cant hurt right?! xi'an has been so much less intimidating and crazy than beijing too,...

hi everybody! so to reassure anybody who might be worried. i am alive and well. we're in xi'an. trying to decide where to go next after pretty much seeing everything we wanted to in beijing and we'l be off to the terracotta warriors tomorrow. the great wall was amazing... tho i think we did it the hard way! got a tour which took us to jinshaoling and then we hiked along the wall for over 10km to the steep fairly intimidating section at simitai (we were exceptio...

so ive finally made it to china. months of planning and some mammouth plane journeys but now im in beijing, dazed, confused and of course intimidated but very excited about seeing chris tomorrow. im just hoping his flight will get here ok and we'l find eachother at the airport. im shattered but luckily this hostel is huge and has everything i need to hide away for a day and get some rest. if only i could get the internet to work properly. i get the distinct impre...