Tokyo to Hiroshima: 13-27 June Well who would have thought we would make it to Japan! This was the most difficult part of our trip to get booked as Japan Airlines were really late in releasing the flights; we finally managed to get them confirmed shortly before we left the UK. We almost gave up at one point but we were both so keen to come here so we persevered with the airline. Then, in March, we were on the beautiful island of Koh Tao in Thailand having our...

Taishan, Beijing & The Great Wall: 8-13 June Mount Taishan is one of the five holy mountains in China and the one that was most frequented by Emperors, who would make sacrifices and pay tributes at the summit. They have left behind fairly substantial ceremonial pathways more than two thousand years old, that snake up the mountainside past numerous temples (mainly Taoist) at which people still come to worship today. We arrived in the late afternoon having be...

Shanghai - 3rd June to 7th June We left Xi'an on the overnight train to Shanghai. This is probably our last overnight train in China and also pretty likely to be the last overnight train on our whole trip. Quite a landmark moment for us really, we've become used to travelling this way. Maybe we'll miss it. We were back in the 4-berth compartments for the 14 hour, 1500km journey to Shanghai (this really is a massive country), so a decent nights sleep beckoned. T...

Xi'an: 30th May to 3rd June We spent our last morning in Yichang with a lazy walk along the banks of the Yangtze. The sun was out and it was a beautifully warm day so we enjoyed some sun and an ice-cream before retreating out of the heat into an air conditioned restaurant for lunch before catching our overnight train to Xi'an. We headed off to the train station dreading the trip with our seating only tickets and headed straight to the ticket office to try our...

The Yangtze River: 23-29 May From Chengdu it's a relatively short journey to Chongqing, 2 hours on the new fast trains, the city is the start point for cruises down the Yangtze through the Three Gorges. There are numerous cruise options that all stop at the main sights, from ferries with dormitories to fully-fledged cruise ships, some of which cover the full 2400km to Shanghai. We opted for somewhere in the mid-range; one of the cheaper cruise ships doing the sh...