Category: China

Our final stop in China was its capital – Beijing. Beside looking forward to the city we were excited to met Roman, Kevin’s cousin, and Hitomi, his girlfriend. They were so kind to let us stay with them for the next week. Once again it was awesome to have...

After another great breakfast in Xiahe, it was time to leave this little gem. First, a bus brought us back to Lanzhou where we later onboarded a night train to Luoyang where we arrived a good 15 hours later. We shared our comfortable soft-sleeper compartment with a very friendly...

Leaving Xia’n to Lanzhou at 7:44 AM. We had bookedv hard seats and the train was quite full so a lot of opportunities for “people watching”. The seats were really quite a bit harder as the ones on the high speeds trains (but still bearable). The ride took a...

As I am importing our old 2013 blog to our new website I have just realized we never posted anything for Xi’an. For sure we want to share at least some pictures from the famous Terracotta Warriors :)....

Initially we wanted to take a 10 hours bus ride to Jiuzhaigou Valley a few hundred kilometers north of Chengdu. However as the whole region had experienced heavy rain falls for the last few weeks the roads were all closed and so we opted for a comfortable one hour...

Our home for the next few nights was the JinJiang Hotel a bit outside the city center but near to a metro station. A lot of the bigger cities have now a metro system in place and are continuously expanding its reach. Quite a good idea as inner-city roads...

Another seven or so hour bus ride along the modern Chinese highways brought us to the huge city of Wuhan (about 10 million inhabitants – crazy, right) where we stayed for two nights. During the days Wuhan was like in an oven – the thermometer hit 38 degrees which...

Our next destination was Huang Shan home of the Yellow Mountains. Getting there was a bit of an Odyssey. In theory the plan was easy, take a cab to the long distance bus station a bit out of the city and take a bus to Tangkou. Unfortunately getting a...

A famous quote says: “In heaven there is paradise, on earth Suzhou and Hangzhou” and therefore it was a must to go at least to Hangzhou. The super fast high speed train need a little more than one hour to do the almost 300 km from Shanghai to Hangzhou...

We arrived in Shanghai after comfortable eight hour train ride. The train was very new and up to 200 km/h fast and so it was quite a relaxing ride (minus one uncle shouting into his mobile phone for half the ride). The Phoenix Hostel which we mainly chose because...