Help traveling North East Asia!

Hey there, In the summer I will be traveling round North East Asia (Beijing, Shanghai, Honk Kong, Japan, Korea etc) for 4 to 8 weeks. I dont know exactly how long I will be going for and was wondering if anyone knows if there is such a thing as open tickets. What I mean when I say this is, is it possible to purchase a flight ticket that would allow me to travel back to the UK whenever or near enough whenever I felt like it? I am trying to limit what I spend on this trip. Is it more or less just as cheap to travel around the cities in China by plane as it is by train? Also any recommendations and experiences in the cities outside Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and would be of great help. Thanks a lot.

Best piece of advise I can give is try coming in and leaving by Hong Kong, you can use Oasis airlines http://www.oasishongkong.com/gb/en/home.aspx they are great for two reasons 1) they are cheap, £159 (including taxes) to fly one way from London to Gatwick. Book really far in advance and you will probably shave £20-30 off that but it's probably not worth the bother. I booked about two weeks in advance and got it for £159. 2) For one way tickets they charge half the price of a return, THAT is unusual by most airline standards and very useful if your planning on staying for any amount of time or go home via another city.

Once in HK you can catch overnight sleeper trains from HK to both Shanghai and Beijing. From Beijing you can catch a ferry to Osaka in Japan, and Osaka you can get a Ferry to Korea as well I believe, so you could do most of your travelling plane free once your here. That might be important because getting into and out of Japan by air is EXPENSIVE (as I'm currently finding out) Also standard advise, get a Japan Rail pass if your heading to Japan (or read up on the available passes) infact if I were you I'd spend a lot of time planning the Japan visit, most everywhere else is relatively cheap (I don't know about Korea to be fair) but Japan is expensive and full of stuff you probably really want to do so take alot of time on it.

Hope some of that helps.

p.s. if you can find a cheap way of going one way to Korea you could start there and work down to hong kong. You'd probably need to shop around at some travel agents tho

Oh I forgot, two other things, 1) it's probably easier and cheaper to get a Chinese visa in Hong kong rather than the UK, takes about two days here and so many people do it it's relatively straightforward. 2) If your coming into HKwithout proof of an onward ticket (which you might not yet have) the Oasis airline people spent 5 minutes umming and arring and checking with people in the back office when I borded at Gatwick. They let me through but I hadn't expected it and it had me worried for a bit! So either book a rail ticket out of HK or just risk it. I've a feeling nobody in HK cares, being a British citizen your entitled to stay in HK without a visa for 6 months, most anyone else gets is 3 I think. I certainly had no problems once I got here, but just be aware that you might have some grief on it from the airline.