Articles from this Category
7 June 2012
Getting going I woke about 0330 today. I have to be up about 0530 but an early night and the fear of missing my 0745 train to Kaifeng must have turned on my body alarm clock. It does take time getting around Shanghai by metro and I set off from the hotel at 0545 arriving […]
6 June 2012
Hell hath no fury like … Naomi, Chris and I happened to be booked on the same bus to Shanghai, so we shared a transport to Wuyuan bus station. So it was our third day of doing thing together. The weather was wet … in fact wetter than the previous days. The bus journey was […]
5 June 2012
Local and Foreign Companions Yesterday’s transport arrangement worked well and we enjoyed each other’s company. It was a nice blend of foreign (Brit) and local (Fuzhou) company. So we agreed to sight-see together again today. Like Indonesia, I get a semi-local experience through my ability to converse and interact with the locals. It was a […]
4 June 2012
This is the real China I woke at 0530 (to the sound of someone chopping firewood) due to jetlag which I fully intend to use this in my favour with early buses and trains ahead. I had slept very well despite the bed being so hard. It felt like a plywood board padded with blankets. […]
3 June 2012
Prices in the new China I set off with my daypack today for a 3 night trip to the Wuyuan area which is about 6h (less 20min rest break) bus journey away. The bus journey was uneventful as the roads were either motorway or very good. This is the new China. Sadly the new China […]
2 June 2012
After a good night sleep I felt like new again. I thought it would be a good idea to but the tickets for the bus tomorrow to Wuyuan. I did this at Shanghai South Long Distance Bus & Railway Station. It was all very painless except travelling by metro and foot takes forever as distances […]
1 June 2012
Sleepless flight We had the weirdest and shallowest take off out of Auckland. We seemed to hover over the lights of South Auckland and it took quite a while before we were away from suburbia. This must have been the Boeing 777 that thought it was an propeller aircraft (or an Airbus A340). I had […]
30 October 2011
Above: The green countryside before arriving into Bandung. Rather than fly out of Jakarta, we thought it would be different to fly out of Bandung to KL/Kuching. We’d save a little on lower departure taxes out of a regional airport … and the distance from Jakarta to Bandung is only 3h by train. The train […]
27 October 2011
We made our way to Labjuanbajo Airport early for our Wings Air 0830 flight to Denpasar-Bali for our connection to Jakarta. We never expected a traffic jam in a little town like Labuanbajo. But today was the day that locals were departing for their Haj in Mecca. The main road was chocka as was the […]
26 October 2011
Dragon-spotting on Komodo Island As we’ve kept ourselves on New Zealand time in order to make early flights and dives, we woke up naturally at 5am … assisted by the sunrise. Breakfast was cheerfully served at 5:30am and we were at Loh Liang, the National Park base for Komodo Island at 6:00am. We had to […]