I was quite excited on this flight as we were going to meet Gwen & Mike. Our flight was a little delayed but there they were at arrivals. Even holding a little name card which was funny! We headed down to the JR office to activate our rail passes & off we went onto the 1st train of the trip. The airport express was exactly that speedy & comfortable! We changed to get the bullet train down to Kyoto. My head was a bit fluffy after all the travelling but...

We had our 1st bullet train experience with the ride from Beijing to Shanghai! 5 hours whizzing along at 314 kmph. It was great, the train had so much leg room & was really comfortable. We arrived in Shanghai and took the subway to find our place. Already Shanghai felt so much more like a European city. Our hotel was in a great location as it was only a 15 minute walk to the Bund. This is the stretch of river promenade where you can see the modern stretch...

We'd arranged to meet Priz & Uday this evening for a meal out. We met them up in Harbin, Uday is from Southern India whilst Priz is Dutch and they're living in Beijing. They took us to a cool little shopping hutong not far from our new hostel and we had a fab meal. This was followed by drinks in a bar we would have walked past if we weren't with them. It just looked like someone's house from the outside but was a snug bar on the inside. Sy got his taste buds...

What a surprise! Another delayed flight!! This was I wasn't too surprised about as not only was pollution looking pretty poor but it seems like all our flight have a delay of some type in china. Landing was the strangest experience as there was nothing but dense smog for all of the descent. I could only see land about 20 seconds before we landed. The taxi system was a bit better organised here so managed to get in the meter taxi queue and get to our hostel for...

We asked the hostel to call ahead to check our next destination was open. Being New Year's Day we had already been warned the restaurants would be closed. It was so off we went to hail a cab to get there. We were off to the Siberian tiger park. We'd heard they had a good breeding program there then trained and released back into the wild. We were first headed into a bus to go around the outer area of the park. From the map it looked like there were lots of dif...