Lijiang rooftops at dusk
Our last week or so has been spent in China’s Yunnan province, a place consisting of mountains, villages and numerous Chinese ethnic minority groups. We made Lijiang, with its cobbled streets, fresh water streams, red lanterns and hordes of local tourists our base for exploring the more remote parts of [...]
Posts from ‘June, 2009’
Yunnan folk
As featured on lonelyplanet.com!
Not only am I boring you, loyal readers, with my travel stories but as of last week select posts from this blog are appearing on the Lonely Planet website. Massively stoked!
My content is being syndicated as part of Lonely Planet’s new BlogSherpa programme that displays relevant blog posts against its own editorial content.
The BlogSherpa [...]
Panda-monium
Feeding time at the Giant Panda Breeding Base, Chengdu
This post doesn’t need too many words, the little black and white fury fellas tend explain themselves and elicit ooohhh and aaahhs pretty well without them.
So I will keep it short. Given scientists studying pandas in the wild can go for years without actually seeing one we [...]
Build ‘em long, build ‘em wide and build ‘em tall
Elizabeth and I at the wall
Growing up in amongst giant bananas, guitars, cows and even clams one learns to appreciate things done on scale. Though long before the fibreglass model memories of my childhood, the Chinese were building them bigger, better and Buddha than ours.
As such, this post is dedicated to The Great Wall of [...]
Bright lights, big city, Beijing
GUEST POST – Elizabeth Dawson
The famous portrait
After a few weeks trooping along the Silk Road, taking in small towns and villages and enjoying the great outdoors, it was high time us champagne-swilling, urban PR-types headed to our true spiritual home – the big smoke – and when it comes to big smokes these days they [...]
Rockin' the Kashgar
Old and new Kashgar
Kashgar, in the far west of China in the Xingjiang province was our first stop in China after crossing the Torugart Pass from Kyrgyzstan. The place was roughly 200km or so from Naryn in Kyrgyzstan, but in many ways we felt a million miles away.
Since the days of the Silk Road, Kashgar [...]
Observations from Kyrgyzstan
Sarala-Saz Jailoo
Yesterday as we drove from Naryn, Kyrgyzstan over the 3,752 metre Toruguart Pass into the Xingjiang province of China we bid farewell to Kyrgyzstan and in fact Central Asia. Thus as has been my tradition with the previous countries, this post is dedicated to our ten observations from Kyrgyzstan.
As I have said previously, when [...]
