Konichiwa! I'm now in a place called Nara, pretty close to Kyoto and have a nice walk in the park with several temples and shrines to see tomorrow. The picture is not of here but of Senso-Ji Temple in Tokyo, which I visited as it was close to my hostel there. Nikko was beautiful! Wasn't really expecting it but was up near some snow-covered mountains and had glorious sunshine all the time I was there. Pine trees, over a foot of snow on the ground and endless blu...

Hello from me only then... Our last days in Hong Kong were indeed well used. After checking into our pretty poor room on Hong Kong Island we vowed to spend as much time away from it as possible and it turned out pretty well. The first day we went to the south coast of the island to a little village called Stanley, clustered around a little bay. The main attraction there was the market that was huge and had loads of good trinkets for sale. We managed to splurge a...

Hello! We're back in Kunming after an excellent few days away. Went to Lijiang to stay at the charming Mama Naxi's Guesthouse, met an excellent gang of people and spent 2 days with them walking the Tiger Leaping Gorge, one of our most impressive experiences yet. I could get poetic and do a whole blog about this walk but to be brief the sights were of the Yangtze River, the 18,000 foot Jade Dragon Snow Mountain right next to us, dusty trails, cooling shade under ...

Greetings! Just a quick one to let you all know that it's been Isey's turn to update the blog entry, so have a look at http://blogs.statravel.com/iseylane3 to check it out. I've had a bit more of the luck the last few days and have managed to see more of Hong Kong than her ladyship at the moment. Strange place because of the unsightly Britishness all around and it almost feels like home in many ways. But had a brilliant birthday looking at the famous skyline wa...

Hello from Yangshuo! We've moved on a bit since Shanghai and seen some very different things, so has been a really interesting few days. Our last day in Shanghai was spent wandering around the artsy French Concession area of town, before going to watch the acrobatics in the evening. For this we saw 10 people riding 1 bicycle, contortionists, hoop jumping and 5 motorcyclists in a 15ft steel ball. Some of it sounds weird but the things they can do are really stunn...