Singapore and Bali

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We stopped over in Singapore for a few days to meet up with my sister Rachel, my brother-in-law Tony and their two kids, Grace and Harry, who just happened to be on their way to France for a holiday. It was great to see them.

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Huangshan: Climbing steeply, mountain torment

The Huangshan mountains are the kind of mountains you imagine when thinking about China: craggy, covered in pines growing at odd angles out of the rock, shrouded in mist and peppered with bamboo on the lower slopes. To get there we stayed in the nearby town of Tunxi which has one old street where the […]

Shanghai: Hijacked by culture

Complete set of Shanghai photos

We left you in the last post as we headed back to Beijing from Chengdu. You can read all about our adventures in Beijing in one convenient blog post. We left Beijing via high-speed rail and sped out of there at 310km/h. This rail link is quite a piece of […]

Leshan: Buddha’s largesse

Complete set of Leshan photos

While we were in Chengdu we took a day trip to see Leshan’s Giant Buddha a couple of hours away by bus. The statue is the tallest pre-modern statue in the world – how’s that for a claim to fame. It has to be one of the prettiest from any […]

Chengdu: Panda land

The complete set of photos and videos are here

When we booked the 11:30pm flight from Xi’an to Chengdu along with an executive apartment style hotel we had no idea what a bad combination this would be. A word on air travel in China first: it’s best avoided. Despite a plethora of humongous airports the […]

Xi’an: Warrior style

The complete set of Xi’an photos are here

Xi’an is one of those towns that loom large in a tourist’s mind for one attraction only, in this case the Terracotta Army. The city of Xi’an is no slouch though, having been around for, well, let’s just call it a hell of a long time. As […]

Pingyao: Putting the old back into fortified walls

Full set of Pingyao photos are here

The one drawback to train travel in China is that it’s hard to buy tickets for a journey if you’re not located in the city you want to start from. We couldn’t buy train tickets for the journey from Datong to Pingyao until we arrived in Datong, by […]

Datong: Buddhism on a big scale

View the full set of Datong photos here

We were catching the train out of Beijing so said our goodbyes to Rich (although we were coming back in a couple of weeks – view the TripLine map to see our route) and headed to the supermarket to buy some snacks for the journey. I waited […]

Beijing – The beating heart of China

See the full set of Beijing photos here

This travelling lark is not all beer and skittles. After an overnight bus from Manali to Delhi and a red-eye flight from Delhi to Hong Kong my body packed it in and gave me a fever, diarrhoea and vomiting for two days, although not before I had […]

My battle with a deadly acronym

If you had asked me a year ago what kind of country Taiwan is I would have cleared my throat, scratched my head and said ” … ummm” before coming up with the entirely unoriginal notion that they seem to manufacture a lot of cheap products. The only reason that my impression changed is that […]