Travel plans
on Tina's Journal (China), 09/Jul/2009 06:52, 34 days ago
I leave Sunday for about 3 weeks of travelling. The plan at the moment is to go to Kunming on Sunday by bus, about 7 hours. An overnight stay there where the following day we'll take the train (18 hours) to Emei Shan which is a mountain about 150km south west of Chengdu. Not sure how much of this mountain we'll manage to climb but there are dozens of temples linked by stone steps all the way up. Probably stay a couple of nights there and then travel 50km east to Leshan where we can view the Great Buddha carved into the cliffs at the riverside. We'll then head north to Chengdu where we'll spend a couple of nights including a morning visit to see the Pandas. After Chengdu we'll head west to the Tibetan township of Tagong to enjoy the grasslands. Not sure how many days but hope to be back in Chengdu for the Solar eclipse on the 22nd July, it should be the longest eclipse of the 21st Century. A couple of days after this I will head north to Xi'an by train (12 hours) and meet up with a VSO colleague who is based there. We will go to Pingyao again by train (not sure how many hours) as it is one of the few towns in China where all the buildings date back to the 18th and 19th Century. We''ll spend a few days in the area, go back to Xi'an where I hope to do a bit of sightseeing as didn't see much on my last visit there apart from the Terracotta Warriors, and then I'll take a 36 hour train journey back to Kunming and then bus to Simao. Lots of trains and buses as can't afford to fly on my VSO allowance! This is a brief plan but I hope to give regular updates as I go along with regular visits to internet cafes, that assuming I'll be able to access the websites I need. Facebook is now one of the many sites recently blocked due to the civil unrest in recent days in Xinjiang Province. Many social networking sites are being targeted in case of any unlawful activity. Oh well! Looking forward to the travels though ;-)