Terracotta Warriors

BULLET TRAIN TO XIAN

The Bullet Train looks wonderfully impressive and so is its performance – 180 mph and astonishingly smooth into the bargain. We arrived dead on time and Donna (our new guide) looking fetching in skin tight black leather trousers met us at the exit and after a brief foray into the local Muslim market: colorful, bustling,…

Pics

TEMPLES/TIANANMEN SQUARE/DANCING IN THE PARK

You can see at a glance that Tiananmen Square could hold a million people should you need it to do so but fortunately on the Saturday that we were there, there were probably only 10,000 or so -mostly Chinese as far as we could tell, who had come to file past Mao’s casket. We were…

Trans Siberian adventure.

THE GREAT WALL IS A MARVEL For a person with bad knees I didn’t do too badly. Mind you I appreciate that we only did a couple of miles of the 21,000 (kilometres)plus, but that wall is NOT in good condition. It was pretty crumbly in parts and the steps, too numerous to count, were…

HOT AND BOTHERED IN BEIJING

The adventure had hardly begun before disaster struck. The combined circumstances of a serious accident on the M4 and slight amnesia on the exact location of ‘Purple Parking meant that we ran through the doors of Terminal 5 just after 3pm for our 4.30 flight. Our Boarding gate was so far away that after having…

Let the packing commence

The pot noodles and packets of dried soup are taking up more room than I thought, not to mention mini choc bars and the gummy bears. However, the paper knickers are safely tucked in along with my field glasses (for scanning the Siberian landscape and spotting the “elusive” wild horses) and my thermal vest, cashmere…