What was he thinking?What on earth made Emperor Qin Shihuang back in 200 BC decide that having a full size replica army  complete with chariots, horses and some 8,000 individual warriors would really protect him in the afterlife? What was he thinking putting so many resources into building his terracotta army?As the first emperor of China, he abolished the feudal system, united the states and territories his army had conquered to unify China, and then ordered ...

"Ladies and Gentlemen we have just landed in Tianjin and the temperature is currently 0 degrees". Wow! We knew Beijing got cold in Winter, but it was now Spring – this wasn't supposed to happen! We donned our hopelessly inadequate coats and found our guide Jane waiting for us to take us from the city of Tianjin some two hours south east of the capital, to the city centre of Beijing. (Tiajin serves as the Air Asia low cost airport for Beijing). As we d...

We made the best of our short stay in Ho Chi Ming City (formerly Saigon) by taking an organized tour to the Cu Chi tunnels of the Viet Cong a couple of hours north of the city ,then coming back to the city to go to the War Remnants Museum. Both excursions, rather than answer questions regarding the war just posed many more! The emphasis, particularly at the museum is on the damage the Americans did both in casualties and materially to the infrastructure and villa...

Slowly, slowly, slowly, comes to mind when thinking about Hoi An. Sometimes the slower pace was welcome - but not always. We took a Vietnam airlines flight to Danang and had an organized transfer to take us to the ancient UNESCO World Heritage city of Hoi An. We spotted the little card with our name on at the airport and when we acknowledged ourselves to the young man, he took off in a hurry pointing for us to follow. We tried to introduce ourselves and ask quest...

Our day began with a knock on our train door telling us we were about to pull into Hanoi station. Our sleeper carriage had again been pretty comfortable and now it was off on a three and a half hour drive to Halong Bay. Well not straight away. We had organized our Vietnam section of our trip through a Vietnam based travel company Aurora Travel and they had thoughtfully organized a hotel room for us for an hour, to enable us to shower and change our clothes. It ma...