Decadence! – I’d have said twenty years ago when I was interrailing. On the train from Xi’an to Beijing, we had a whole bedroom for just the two of us! Our own private bathroom...
China
WeChat, not WhatsApp WhatsApp is blocked in China, so everyone uses WeChat instead. If you book small-medium size hotels, they’ll probably ask for your WeChat. It’s also handy if you hire...
So, Xi’an. Just a couple hours flight from Shangri-la, but worlds apart. And, thankfully, normal altitude. I hadn’t realised, but it was the end of the Silk Road, with lots of Middle Eastern...
What a road trip! As if destination: Shangri-La wasn’t enough, our route took us through Tiger Leaping Gorge and through the mountain roads where tour buses don’t venture. The road was narrow and...
Chinese place names are magic. Everywhere else in the world, place names are prosaic descriptions – black pool, slough – or refer to some dull person: Snowdon, Brighton – with...
China got off to a rocky start. 5am start, with 3h sleep, slow taxi to the border, slow (but happily painless) bordercrossing, and got to the Zhuhai train station on mainland China with an hour to...
Hotpot sounds so innocent, doesn’t it? The name summons up warming winter foods at home, preferably when it’s freezing and raining outside. Turns out it’s a bit different here. A...
Macau is delightful! We hadn’t expected to particularly like it – colleagues who had visited had winced slightly when mentioned: it’s famous as the Vegas of China, full of giant...