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Mission Impossible? <br />To travel the world and give you all a run down of adventures, experiences, things to see and the best bars in town! I may even stop here and there and earn a few bob...but after this who would have me...

Asia, part II: China (2)

Richard Rosss
2006-04-03 13:38:02

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into the coldest place on earth at 8am. Booked a CITS tour to take us to the hanging monastry (a monastry built into the rock face 150m above the ground. It was built by the guys hanging off the clif face with ropes attached from the top of the mt at 400m... There were snow flurries there and it was baltic! Then went to the cloud ridge caves to see all the budda's. Caves were built to honor Budda, but some of the caves were decorated right up to the ceiling with amazing colours and stories built into the wall frescos. There were so many, with so many designs and colours - truely amazing place, again it was deserted (SARS?) apart from us 8 on tour and sovenir folks.
Staying overnite in really nice hotel by train station, too cold to
walk anywhere else.

22/4 - Beijing
Train this morning at 8am, was empty and the folks who were there, all wore masks! Arrived into town and then rushed to PSB. I realised on train 2 days ago that my visa was up on Sunday. So I handed in my passport which I will pick up on Sat and will have another extension for a month. I also need to get my mongolia and vietam visa (although, I may get the latter on my return to Beijing). So potentially I will be staying in China till Tues/Weds when I will hop on trans Mongolian train. Canny buy tkt till I have Mongolian visa...

Here are my tips from China...

it is a beautiful place, much nicer than I expected. Such a place of contrasts. The three gorges, the great wall and the landscape outside Datong where stunning. It was good that there were few tourists there, both locals and westerners.

The people are generally nice, although I always felt that some where looking at us like dollar bills. The others were quite friendly. Its a shame as now i am more suspicious to these Thai chaps, whom most seem to be nice. Its such a cheap place for quality fakes and DVD's etc. Travelling there was great (partly cos M had primed me so well) and so easy. The overnite train journeys become more desirable for me to sleep than the hostels... Easy stuff as the networks are so good. They are spending Billions on new rds/railways thru the town. They don't need it but they are communist, and want to show off! the bridges we saw being built over the Yangtze were so high (cos of the new lake soon to be filled) and huge...I doubt that in the Uk we could as spectacularly as they do there.