China
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China
More catching up. After Tokyo, we spent a week in Beijing. I haven’t found Chinese cities to be very pleasant places and Beijing is fine example of an ugly city. It’s built on a flat featureless plain and smothered by air pollution. The worse air pollution I’ve ever seen. It’s hazy just two blocks away! Beijing has massive multilane roads clogged with traffic and is not at all pedestrian friendly.
Luckily, the buses and subway work well and taxi’s are plentiful and cheap. It wasn’t hard to get around. We dropped the idea of riding bikes as it would put K* in...
After mulling over our options, we decided to hire a 4x4 and driver and explore northern Sichuan rather than fly somewhere else in China.
Domestic tourism is massive in China. With growing wealth, the Chinese must be travelling more and more so all the standard tourist sites are very busy even in low season. I would hate to see these places in high season. By getting our own wheels, we hoped to get away from standard tour routes and see the countryside.
Our driver and guide was a friendly Tibetan fellow by the name of Gonpo. It was great to get his...
We're been in Chengdu for a few days now. Right from the trip in from the airport, it's obvious that Chengdu is a richer city than Xi'an. There are forests of new apartment blocks sprouting everywhere. Construction appears frantic here. There's also landscaping and attempts to make the place look nice which lacked in Xi'an. The downtown core is larger and more modern. There are poorer neighbourhoods and places we were told to avoid.
We were greeted at the airport by our driver and guide as the first four days of our trip was a private tour. They took us to...
Made it to China. We almost missed our connection to Xi'an due to the massive queue/scrum for the domestic flights airport security check taking over an hour to get through. Great introduction to China - especially all the shouting and scuffles with security guards. And then they kept changing the departure gate for the flight!
I can't believe how terrible the air pollution was in Xi'an. Caught myself trying to take very shallow breaths just to avoid breathing it. It's so bad, you can barely see any blue sky. You have to look straight above you.
We stayed at the Bell And...
Tonight we’re catching a red-eye flight to China. Our first stop is Xi’an. Then we fly to Chengdu in Sichuan for a short local tour but we have about ten days to do whatever we want. Not sure yet whether we’ll go south or east or we could even try going to Tibet. We’re going to make it up as we go. By April 6th we have to be in Beijing in order to catch our flight to Osaka. We’re hoping to be in Kyoto in time to see the cherry blossoms but according to current predictions, we’re going to...