StopShot

The “first” day comprised of us hopping on a train up to Heathrow to board a 10hr flight to Shanghai. Apparently we were on a plane that had been in operation for just over a year, which sounds promising but somewhere along the line they decided that it would be Continue Reading

Morning calls were scheduled for 1.5hrs before we had to depart. This was a little tight when you have to account for two people getting ready, pack bags when applicable, which are collected half an hour after wakeup call and have breakfast so we started a habit of setting an Continue Reading

Having been at such a marvelous hotel previously the hotel in Beijing was disappointing. Apparently the tour had upgraded the old hotel to this one due to complaints so I wouldn’t like to know what its predecessor was like. Just before 6AM we were woken by a clock chiming outside. Continue Reading

Woken up by the dang clock again. If nothing else it confirmed that it really was that loud. Today’s agenda: the Great Wall. On the way there we were advised that there were two different ways to climb the wall at the point that we were – left for the Continue Reading

We actually needed to be up early so the clock wasn’t that bad on the last day. We said goodbye to the poor food too, thankfully. A visit to the Temple of Heaven was the only thing on the agenda, other than hopping on the Bullet train again to X’ian. Continue Reading

The first thing on the agenda for the day was a trip to the city wall. Apparently it’s the last “active”, complete wall in China. Of course, nowadays it’s just for a point of interest. Off to the one of the sides of the part of the wall that we Continue Reading

As soon as we got outside of the airport we were met by a waft of fresh air! It was like the direct opposite of Xi’an; everything was so lush and green that you couldn’t not appreciate the cleanliness of the air. Johnny was our specialist for Guilin and Yangshuo Continue Reading

We seemed to have a string of bad luck when it came to hotel rooms after Shanghai. In Guilin we had the traffic fairly close by so that kept disturbing us during the night as the room had terrible noise isolation. On the bright side though we had a lot Continue Reading

There wasn’t really much to say about the end, really so I thought I’d pad it out a bit. The hotel prior to the flight back had a really fascinating view indoors in my opinion – walking out of the room we were just opposite the stairs overlooking the bar Continue Reading