The Big Trip...

Hey everyone

Woke up early and splurged on the 40 Yuan (about 2 pounds 50) breakfast and met the rest of the group for our first full day sightseeing in Beijing. Today we went to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. The Square is located in the center of Beijing City and you can visit Tiananmen Tower, Monument to the People's Heroes, Great Hall of the People, Mao Zedong Memorial Hall and see the national flag raising ceremony. After a walk around the square we entered the Forbidden City. This is now known as The Palace Museam and was the imperial palace during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Surrounded by a six meter deep moat and a ten meter high wall are 9,999 buildings. It was called the Forbidden City because the general public were forbidden to enter into it.

From the Palace we all got into Rickshaws and got taken for a ride down the cobblestone streets of old Beijing. These communities are very quickly being destroyed to make way for new, bigger roads, so it was a real treat to be able to see what Beijing used to look like. The best part of the day was at lunchtime when teh rickshaws dropped off the group at a Chinese family's home and ate lunch with them in their house. It was really lovely and they were so excited to have westerners in their house that they insisted on showing us how to make steamed dumplings and then they showed us their pet grasshopper and crickits...so random!

We had some free time late afternoon and then at night we headed to the Theatre to see a Kung Fu show. This was incredible...i have never seen such amazing dancing and monks were breaking slabs of metal on their heads! Its really hard to descrbie but i'd recommend anybody coming to China to see one of these shows.

After the show we headed to Bar Street for some dinner. Pizza was the meal of the night which was fantastic as we were all getting a bit sick of huge chinese banquets by this point. Today was the Dragon Baot Race festival so it was really busy and the restaurants were giving out free steamed rice and date parcels..very strange, but tasty nonetheless.

The following day was a free day so we slept in and then went to Silk Street Market which is amazing. Its a huge indoor market, the size of a shopping mall and you can get anything from shoes to pearls to fake bags to designer suits. Anyway, we had a great time bartering with the shop owners and i was very pleased with my china tea set that i got for 250 Yuan, down from 1700! AT night we went to a restaurant near our hotel and i am not sure what happened but suddenly my hand swelled up and i fainted and was really ill. Hmmm...think i took an allergic reaction to something i ate. Luckily i was with people from the group so they took me back to the hotel and i was better very quickly.

The next day was out last full today together as a group, and it was the day that we visited the Great Wall of China. We were up early and had a 2 hour bus ride to the point of the wall that we were going to climb. Today was hot and the smog had cleared (due to some rain overnight) so we decided to get the cable car up to teh start of teh wall walk rather than hike up the hill. Good move. We spent about 2 and a half hours walking the section of the wall that we were brought to (no..we did not cover all 6,700 km!) and then got the cable car down. Two people (Samantha and Steve) on our tour got engaged on the wall which was lovely news so we cracked open the beers on the bus on the way back to town. On the way back we also stopped off at the new Olympic Stadium that is in its final stages of being buils. Called 'The Nest', it does actually look like a huge metal birds nest that should be outstanding when lit up..will have to wait until next year to see! From here we went to a traditional chinese tea house and got taught how to drink tea properly and the merits of the different types of tea.

At night, for our final meal together we went to a traditional beijing restuarnat and ate Peking Duck (otherwise known as duck and pancakes for all you westerners). The chef came and carved it out at the table and it was a lovely (although i was scared to eat anything really because of what happened the night before).

The following day everyone was leaving at various times to head off in different directions (apart from me). I ended up spending the day with Ian and Michelle who were not leaving until 5pm..so i took them back to Silk Street and helped them out with bargaining (they were hopeless). At night i wandered down the pedestrian street near our hotel (whioch i actually just found yesterday even though i have been in this city for almost a week!) and had an early night. It was strange being in a room on my own as this was the first time since Vietnam that i have been alone!

Today I headed to the Summer Palace which is a huge and beautiful park with old Chinese buildings (i.e. pagodas, bridges etc) surrounded by a huge lake. After a few hours of wandering around there i headed back to the hotel to rest (and to type up this blog).

Tonight i am going out for dinner with the only 2 people left from my tour.

Anyway, this is my last entry re what i have been doing on my trip (as i plan on doing not much else except pack) but I will do a follow up entry tomorrow.

See everyone soon

Danielle xxx

hey everyone

What a busy week! We had a free day in Xi'an which was lovely as I could finally sleep in and not be expected to be downstairs, washed and fed at 7:30am for once! After a lazy morning, me, Megs, Sam and Steve set out for the Wild Goose Pagoda which is set in a huge park and is absolutely beautiful. After walking around there for a few hours we went to teh Xi'an Museam which was a complete waste of time because it was all old artefacts which interests me as much as watching paint dry. We also spent some tiem walking along the city wall (it is amazingly preserved and runs in a complete square around the inner city of Xi'an). All in all, it was a busy day which ended off with a lovely banquet dinner and a chinese opera show. The show was lovely..no opera singing, but lots of dancing and playing chinese musical instruments (mum and dad - i finally know what those ornament things you have in teh house actually sound like!), however was ruined slightly by the 4 drunk middle age people sitting at teh table in front of us, fanning themselves, talking loudly and fainting all over the place. Wonderful.

The following day was highlight of the trip. We got up ealry to drive one hour to see the magnificant terracotta warriers. There are over 2000 warriers already uncovered and they are unsure how many more are hidden deep within the grounds. They were first discovered by a farmer who was digging a well and came across teh top of one of teh warriers head. Apparantly they were made thousands of years ago by an emporer who wanted his army to be rememebered beacuse they were so great. Anyway..we had a great day and learnt a lot about the history of China thought these sculptures.

After the warriers we went to visit a school for mentally disabled children. The reason we went here is because Intrepid (my tour company) gives a lot of money to help this foundation through our tour costs. We sat and watched a show that the children put on for us and learnt a lot about the opportunities for mentally handicaped children in China. After visiting the school we went straighht to teh airport and flew to Yichang which is where we were to board the ship to take us around the 3 Gorges.

We arrived at the boat by 9pm (after the interesting flight of being ina 30 seat plane) and I went straight to bed as I was exhausted. The boat was a bit dingy and one night was definitely enough on it. The following day we lef the big ship for a small boat to go around teh 3 gorges. These were absolutely beautiful although the only bad thing was that there was a chinese tour guide who insited of speaking into a megaphone for the entire 4 hours in chinese!!!!! We all wanted to kill her by the end! We left the boat in teh afternoon and checked into a hotel in one of the communities around the 3 gorges area for one night.

The following day we were up at 8 to boat teh hydrofoil boat to take us back to Yichang. From here we went to have a look at teh dam project that is going on at the moment. They are building a huge dam to deal to with all teh floods that kill hundreds of people each year around the Yangtse river area. tehy are also having to relocate hundreds of thousands of people because they are raising teh water level so high to fuel a new power plant. The whole project is extimated to be cost around 40 billion US dollars.

After this we caught a 20 hour (yes, thats right..20 hours!) train to Beijing. This train was much nicer than our other sleeper traina s there were only 4 beds in a room and they evern had doors! luxury! no..it was absolutely fine, and we just sat and ate snacks all night and tehn got a good 8 hours sleep for once! The highlight was when 4 chinese students came and sat in our cabin with us (they were fascinated with Sam's long blond hair) and we (along with the help of our tour guide Richard) were able to converse with them.

We arrived into beijing at 2pm the follwong day and had free time until the next day.

hey everyone

So we left Shanghai in the middle of the afternoon for Nanjing. This was a 2 hour train journey that passed really quickly whichwas good. Nanjing is a lot smaller than Shanghai and is less commerical but it is the capital of the south of China. We arrived into Nanjing around 5pm , checked into the hotel and headed out for dinner. We had a lovely banquet again (the food is amazing!) and then wandered around the night market before having a drink in a very posh hotel (for only 2 pounds ) and tehn having an early night.

The follwing day we went to the Mausoleum of the last emperor of China which was actually really intersting. It was set in a beautiful park and we spent aroud 3 hours there, climbing pagodas and learning about the history of China, especially the revolutions and the fall of the Emperors.

After this, we had a quick lunch of noodles and went back to the hotel to get ready for a very intersting journey to Xi'an. This was a 12 hour sleeper train that left at 5pm, arring in at 5am the follwing day. Well, this train was hysterical..beds were 3 bunks high and crammed together like sardines...in fact the entire train held 1500 people!! We were all exhausted so we settled into bed at 9pm (i scored a bottom bunk!) even though lights did not go out until 10 pm. Around 9:45 a chinese lady came around selling spinning toys that hummed happy birthday..so bizzare and it completely cracked me up!! The worst thing about teh journey was the smell of smoke...outside they are burning their crops for fertiliser and the smoke fills the train..well, it can;t be great for global warming!

We arrived at 6:30am (after being woken up at 4am!!!) and headed for our hotel in Xi'an. Its a lovely hotel, in a great location right in the center of the city. Today we just wandered around the market and went for a traditional meal of chinese dumplings!

Tonight we are going to muslim stret for dinner and some late night shopping, and tehn tomrorow we are seeing the sights of the city before heading to the Terracotta warriers the day after.

Take care

Danielle xxx

Hey everyone

So, I'm in China now..my final destination and last stamp in my passport.

I arrived into Shanghai on the morning of the 9th and my first impressions were good. The hotel i am staying in is lovely (a big step up from hostels!) and that is because I am doing an organised tour with Intrepid travel. My tour meeting was not until 5.30 pm so after pottering about teh hostel for a few hours i set out to see the city.

Shanghai is absolutely beautiful..probably one of my favourite cities I have ever seen. Our hotel is right in the center so I had a walk around, found some shopping malls and went to look at the impressive skyline at the Bund. The Bund is the financial district of Shanghai and has extremely impressive buildings along with the Pearl Tower which is kind of like teh CN tower but silver and pink..very bizarre.

Anyway, after eating my first lot of chinese food (very different to home by the way) i went to my group meeting where i met the other people in my group and got told how everything would be working. I am the youngest in teh group and teh age range is huge, but everyone is really lovely and sociable so its all good. We went out for dinner to a random chinese restaurant in a back street that our guide took us to, and he ordered a bunch of meals for us all to try...very interesting. All ic an say is that the 2 months in thailand have definitely paid off as i am now a master at the chopsticks whereas everyone else was struggling completey!

After dinner we went on a boat ride down by the Bund and there were fireworks going off everywhere because it was the 10th anniversary since HK became part of China.

The following day we were meeting at 9am..so i was up at 8 and went to get raekfast on teh mains treet, but couldnt because there were thousands of chinese people all dressed in Beijing 2008 teeshirts as part of a 'get fit for the olypics' program all doing their exercises. Great.

As a group, we all walked to the Museam of Shanghai which was not that interesting..mostly just artefacts and stuff. So i left quite quickly, and spent teh rest of teh day getting teh tourist tunnel to the Pearl and going up teh Pearl. The tourist tunnel is a bizzare way to cross teh river - you get into little pods that hold about 4 poeple and travel down a track as flashing lights and stuff come around you..i can;t describe it..its very very strange. After going up to teh top of the Pearl and taking teh obligatory photos i went to teh history museam at teh bottom which was really interesting and thn settled into Starbucks at the adjoining mall for the rest of the afternoon.

At night the group met up again and we went to see chinese acrobats! The show was absolutely amazing and i spent most of it with my hands covering my eyes because the stuff they were doing was so scary! The grand finally was 'the ball of death' where 5 men on motorbikes went into a huge ball on teh stage and rode around it...i was sure they would crash but they escaped without a scratch...obviously!

After the show we went and grabbed some noodles before heading to bed.

Today, we are going to Nanjing overnight before heading to Xi'an the following day. So i will update again as soon as possible.

Bye xxx