Our final train today ….. We spent the morning wandering around the area close to the hotel and found a lovely market area, so spent some time there indulging in some retail therapy. Around midday we headed off to the station. The stations for the bullet trains are always slightly out of town and they tend to resemble airport terminals. Even the terminology is...
A full day of sightseeing in Shanghai today …. We started the morning with a trip to the Bund. The Bund is a waterfront area in central Shanghai and looks directly over the new financial district of Pudong. The word Bund literally means ’embankment’ and it is an area along the bank of the Huangpu River. The road by the river is one of the most...
Another day, another bullet train. This one was marginally faster with a top speed of 305 km per hour and took 6 hours and 10 minutes to do the trip from Xian to Shanghai. Once in Shanghai, we were bussed to the hotel in the French concession. This area was ceded to the French as part of an agreement in 1849. The agreement ended in 1943 when the French, under...
Terracotta day today – lots and lots of it ….. In fact, according to some estimates more than 8,000 terracotta warriors, 130 chariots and over 600 horses. The terracotta army is about an hour’s bus ride outside Xian. We started early – about 8am and in the way were dropped at a terracotta warriors workshop. Actually, drop the first four...
Another day, another train …. This one, however, was different. This one flew at the speed of a bullet – well, a bullet train anyway! From having got used to clattering along and bouncing around at a maximum of 80-90 km per hour, all of a sudden, we were doing 300 km per hour. The big difference was that we really knew on previous trains that we were...
A second day in Beijing today and, being a Sunday, we got to watch the Chinese at play. One of the things the locals like to do is apparently to head out to the Summer Palace to the north of the city. This was also exactly where we headed as well! The summer palace, like many things here is UNESCO World Heritage listed. Its origins are in the Qing Dynasty which was...
A day in the frantic, bustling (and smoggy) capital of China – Beijing – today. With a pollution warning of ‘high’ today, we took the complimentary face masks out with us for the day. How many other hotels in the world provide complimentary face masks, I wonder! The day was overcast with the sun not able to break through the smog, but Beijing...
Another day on the train today. We left the hotel around 6am for a 7.30am departure from Ulan Bator. The route took us through the Gobi Desert and while a remote and desolate landscape, it nevertheless had a raw beauty about it. Despite being desert we saw quite a lot of animals including camels, horses, cattle herds and a local variety of deer. Slightly less...
On February 17th we start our journey to Hong Kong from St. Pancras. From London we head for Paris for one night and then on to Moscow via Berlin and Warsaw. At Moscow we board the Trans-Siberian via Ulan Bator to Bejing and then on to Hong Kong via Xian and Shanghai. The distances between each stop are: 0km London492km Paris1542km Berlin2092km Warsaw3348km...