Hohhot. Cold, dark, miserable and wet. It is about 7°C when my train arrives around midnight and as I get off at the station it starts raining. What joy. In the dark I scramble from hotel to hotel to find a place to sleep. Most are full as 1.38bln Chinese are travelling this week, others are way too expensive and the places listed in the guide book either don't exist anymore or are unfindable. Finally a helpful local points me to a place a bit further down the...

It seems I keep returning to Beijing again and again and again. This is already my third entry of the metropolis. But I do love this city. The train pulls in and I split with Marius and Denis. They'll head off towards the eastern coast for some swimming. Well, good luck with that, the sea's probably way too cold for that, but if they want to. My itinerary is to the west, Inner Mongolia. The day is yet undecided. I have not yet seen a single thing in Beijing so ...

Despite all my big plans to look around in Beijing the morning before we leave to Tai'an I spend the whole morning in bed, sleeping, resting. It's good to catch up with a little bit of sleep after all this running around. The train leaves in the early afternoon and we take the taxi to Beijing South Railway Station. Forty minutes through the city, mostly going at 80km/h, hardly ever stopping and the never-ending stream of offices, hotels, big buildings do not wa...

China is NOT Asia. At least not the Asia as I've come to know it. Forget about running around in sandals. Forget about wearing shorts and a shirt. The temperatures are mediocre at best. Even the chaos on the roads is modest, the honking negligible. Where have I ended up? Maybe it's just Beijing. This city; hell city, I'm better off calling it a metropolis. 16mln inhabitants. Whip out the city map. Try going from the Olympic area to the centre. A taxi takes, eve...

Frozen solid, I arrive at Beijing International Airport around seven in the morning. After I have secured a taxi - which is an adventure by itself as not only do drivers not speak English, most don't even read English characters - I head into the city to meet up with the others already at the conference. I actually had to go back to the airport information centre to write down the Chinese name of the hotel, but even then we stopped two times asking for directio...