Showing 1-17 of 17 results
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Learning Mandarin: Week 3
Blog: Travels with a Nine Year Old - 17 October 2011
A week to go before we head out of Kunming into the great wide open, over 30 hours of language lessons in, and we are, both of us, beginning to...
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The Friday Photo: Nine Dragon Pond
Blog: Travels with a Nine Year Old - 14 October 2011
It’s been sunny lately. So t’other day we went to the park. And the park was a lake. With nine dragons. Now, the Chinese have been landscaping dazzling gardens for...
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How to Ride a Bus in China
Blog: Travels with a Nine Year Old - 5 October 2011
Even after boarding Indonesian ferries, riding rural Cambodian buses and squeezing onto the London Tube during the Christmas Eve shopping frenzy, taking the bus in China has redefined my notion...
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The Friday Photo: Heavenly Palace
Blog: Travels with a Nine Year Old - 30 September 2011
Yesterday we wandered through the skyscrapers of downtown Kunming to gawp at this ninth-century pagoda, set in a quiet garden where grandmothers take their grandchildren after school. In the evening,...
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House-hunting in China — Easier than it Seems
Blog: Travels with a Nine Year Old - 22 September 2011
This morning, I woke up on the 32nd floor, looked out of my bedroom window, across the smog that clouds the rising sun, across the skyscrapers, across the building sites,...
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Come away O human child
Blog: Drifting Aimless - 24 October 2010
To the traveller there is a special kind of horror which lies in the plotted map. The fear of permanency, of the unchanging and eventually becoming the eternal. The knowledge that you can never really fully leave a place nor at the same time ever return to it again. That all the memories in your [...]
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Enter the Dangsters
Blog: Drifting Aimless - 13 October 2010
“Whooooooo!” the girls in the doorway screamed, “is everybody ready to paaaaarty!” she shouted throwing her arms in the air and allowing her body length black shawl to fall to the floor revealing two inch stiletto high heals, fishnet tights, hotpants, a bare midriff and a overflowing corset jam-packed and on the brink of going [...]
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Back drifting
Blog: Drifting Aimless - 3 October 2010
Dreams of Siberia give way to the blue morning haze, ice on a northerly wind, winter has found me once again, its time to flee, to south and out of China for good, already I have been here nearly two months, time to move on. I plot a course skirting the border back to Kunming [...]
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Hoist the sails once more
Blog: Drifting Aimless - 12 May 2010
22nd Oct I cant stay here forever, I just cant I have to move, but where? How do I get to Vietnam? I have to get a visa, that can be done in Kunming but will probably take the best part of a week, perhaps I’ll skip Hong Kong, what do I even know about [...]
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Early signs of an incipient madness
Blog: Drifting Aimless - 23 April 2010
I have a plan now, my mind is set in motion, wo yao dao gong gong cheche zhan qu, I tell the taxi driver, hao de! he replies and we’re away. So afterwards I board (and board is really the only word to do justice) what would be the nicest bus I had ever seen, [...]
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The secret land beyond the clouds
Blog: Drifting Aimless - 30 March 2010
14th Oct The cold Lijiang dawn greets me bringing strange paranoid haze, my first instinct is to hole up here in the hostel of the day. Outside the constant stares and laughter would normally wash over me but in this fragile mood seclusion seems preferable. Its one of those rare occasions that the constant hustle [...]
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Wanderings in the realm of the hungry ghost
Blog: Drifting Aimless - 17 March 2010
Cooing softly from the darken alleyway, Lijiang the beautiful, the seductive, soft and yielding, the painted lady of Yunnan. Lijiang the chinese fairytale, a sinophillic fantasy, Lijiang the city-ornament of the east, Lijiang pretty, beguiling, hollow and empty, the whispered promise of a whores voice. I spend the day wandering the old town, its incredibly [...]
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Being Artsy in Kunming
Blog: Four Seas As Home - 10 March 2010
[We haven’t had internet for a few days, so I’m publishing this a few days late – a lot of these travel posts will probably come with a few days delay, just as an FYI to anyone who we might be able to meet up with along the way] We’re now in Kunming, the first stop [...]
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The sheer unbridled joy of aimless travel
Blog: Drifting Aimless - 8 March 2010
10th Oct I start the day in a very good mood, back on the road and on to adventures anew. Today I decide to take a bus to the western Yunnan city of Lijiang just for the hell of it. I dont know much about it other than its enroute to the famous and feared [...]
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Kunming
Blog: Drifting Aimless - 2 March 2010
Apologies for the lack of updates recently, my blog has been largely inaccesible to me recently and seems ive been struck down by swine flu the revenge. Anyway, soon Ill be traveling into the jungles to live amongst the (formor) headhunter tribes of Borneo. Anyway back on message 7th Oct Writing about travel from the [...]
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Slow, slow train a'coming. More of Kunming & Dali, China
Blog: Hard Beds in China - 23 November 2009
In the end, we spent four nights in Kunming and I loved it. Maybe it was the great public transport, the friendly people, the food, maybe it was our hotel. It certainly was our city for taking in Buddhist temples. Our third day, we caught a minibus out to the Bamboo Temple, northwest of Kunming. It dates back to the Tang Dynasty and is a must-see for, among ...
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Across-the-bridge and far away...Kunming, Yunnan, China
Blog: Hard Beds in China - 13 November 2009
After a 19-hour train journey on another 'hard sleeper', we arrived in Kunming late morning: I was disappointed at first to find it to be yet another westernised built-up city with high-rise office blocks and shops all around and not a pagoda or traditional curving roof in sight. However Kunmin ...
Showing 1-17 of 17 results
