The Chinese Spring Festival (or Chinese New Year to westerners) is the biggest public holiday in the Chinese calendar (incidentally, it’s now the Year of the Tiger). Every year Chinese people go back to their parents to celebrate with their families, leaving huge metropolises like Beijing bizarrely ghost town-esque and devoid of life. It’s also an excellent chance for us expats to take a break from city life and go on a tour of China, or at least part of China anyway. This year, Hannah and I decided to go to Yunnan Province in the south west of China; it borders Laos, Vietnam and Burma (or should that be Myanmar? – I can never remember) and has lovely tropical weather, so we’d be feeling an early burst of summer sun, as well as escape from the freezing temperatures of Beijing (honestly, it’s still brass monkeys here, although it’s getting less cold every day) ...   more »

There are two main public holidays in China: the spring festival (around late January, early February – also known as Chinese New Year) and the autumn festival (around early October). Each of these festivals lasts for approximately one week and is usually a good chance to go travelling. However, it’s often best not to travel around China at these times since every man, woman, child, dog and hamster journey back to their families’ homes in rural China. Leaving the country is therefore the best bet, and Hannah and I decided that we’d like to go to Japan; it’s only a three hour flight away and offered us the chance of further immersing ourselves into Asian culture ...   more »

To celebrate that I’d finally secured a job in Beijing, Hannah and I thought we should go on yet another holiday. Having never been to a desert before (unless you count sailing down the Nile through the Sahara as going to the desert - I don't) we decided that we'd go to the Gobi desert in Inner Mongolia (curiously, Outer Mongolia is a country in its own right, whereas Inner Mongolia is a Chinese province, although both speak the same language). We both liked the idea of sitting by an oasis and looking out at the sand dunes as they flowed to the horizon and beyond ...   more »

Hannah and I recently spent some time back in the UK, taking the much needed chance to see friends and family and generally remind ourselves what our home country is like. By the time we’d got back to China, we were raring to get back into the culture and life that we’ve made for ourselves here and decided that the best way to do this was to go on yet another mini break somewhere. China is a big country (the fourth largest in the world, behind Russia, Canada and the United States) so there was quite a bit of choice. We decided that we’d like to see some traditional Chinese scenery, the kind which traditional Chinese artists regularly depict in their paintings. Whilst this did narrow it down somewhat, it still left quite a wide area of choice. A quick jaunt on the Internet and we’d made our minds up; we were going to go to the Hunan Province and visit the remarkable quartz and sandstone peaks in the Zhangjiajie National Park. We found a web site that specialised in tours there and booked our trip ...   more »

In March Hannah was sent to work in Bangkok for a couple of weeks so we though it would be a good idea if she took a few days off and I came out for a little break. The first, and blindingly obvious, thing to note about Bangkok is the weather. When I left Beijing, the weather was still cold, a nasty wind cutting the skin to the bone, but it couldn't have been more different on arrival in Bangkok. I stepped out of the airport and was greeted by a warm wind and an outside temperature of about 30 degrees Celsius at about 6pm. Being that Thailand is in the Northern hemisphere (just) this therefore made it what the locals called the "cold season"; That time of year where in Beijing winter begins to transform into spring but the days are still cold and the wind still stings. It was a very welcome change!   more »

While Beijing has generally been the home of various Chinese dynasties and their seats in the Imperial Palace (AKA the Forbidden City), as well as having a huge political history, Shanghai has pretty much been where the money is. Before the Opium Wars and the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 (where China ceded Hong Kong to the British and gave them the right to trade and reside in five cities, one of which was Shanghai), Shanghai was just an isolated port town residing on the Yangtze River Delta. This very location, however, made it an ideal place to bring in trade of all kinds from the rest of the world, giving it the potential (which the brutal British saw) of being a major hub in world economics. After the British got in and began making enormous amounts of money, other countries wasted no time in following suit. Before long the French, Americans, Germans and Japanese had all taken parts of Shanghai for themselves and also began to accrue vast wealth at the expense of the Chinese people (who were employed to spin silk, mill grain, roll cigarettes and perform other forms of menial labour for the rich foreigners, often in pitiful conditions and for miniscule wages). The money kept coming in and in the 1930s Shanghai finally reached its decadent heights, with the city being described by Fortune magazine as "the fifth city of the Earth, the megalopolis of continental Asia, inheritor of ancient Baghdad, of pre-war Constantinople, of nineteenth century London, of twentieth century Manhattan". A city of so much money brings with it gangsters, drugs, warlords, brothels and spy rings all searching for their own way to use and abuse the "whore of the Orient" as Shanghai came to be known. Still it grew. Even through the second World War, Shanghai still found ways to prosper ...   more »

About 500km from the Russian border lies a small (by Chinese standards - it has a population of 4 million) ..About 500km from the Russian border lies a small (by Chinese standards - it has a population of 4 million) city called Harbin. Apparently it's quite famous but I'd never heard of it before (not that you should use my lack of knowledge as a benchmark), especially the ice festival that they put on every year. Hannah and I thought it would be a great way to open the new year by travelling to Harbin, where in winter the temperature averages around -20 Centigrade, to enjoy the festival. We used a local company that specialises in tours around China for non-Chinese speaking people and were given an itinerary which involved travelling up to Harbin on a sleeper train, going to the ice festival, spending a night in a hotel, doing various other activities the next day and then flying back to Beijing in the evening ...   more »

Last weekend, Hannah and I decided that we fancied a trip out of Beijing to see other parts of China; less cosmopolitan areas where there are no western faces wandering importantly around. Looking at various train timetables we came across a place called Tianjin that was only one and a half hours away. That's positively next door for the Chinese, who will happily travel overnight in the most uncomfortable hard sleeper trains if it means they can buy some new shoes and a pair of mittens connected with string through their jacket sleeves ...   more »

Unlike London, the underground trains in Beijing are very cheap; 2 RMB per trip (that equates to approximately 13p) and by trip I mean you can travel from anywhere on the underground to anywhere else on the underground, no matter how many different lines you need to use and how long your journey is. At present there are only 4 lines operating; Line 1, Line 2, Line 5 and Line 13. These serve Beijing pretty well but, again unlike London, they don't cover the entirety of the city. If you live in the east or west, you'll have to get a taxi everywhere (or at least to the closest station), since the subway only really covers central Beijing, the north and the south (and even then it doesn't stretch all the way north or south). What there is, though, is pretty good ...   more »