Articles from this Category
4 May 2005
Above: Osaka’s Dotonbori area. Arriving in Osaka We arrived at Osaka for our four night stopover. Osaka’s Kansai airport was impressive in terms of the technology to build it on an artificial island, and to keep it above water as it gradually subsides. But it is very drab inside, with unimpressive materials such as lino […]
5 November 2002
We took the Star Ferry to meet Kim’s friend Chris for yum cha breakfast. He took us to a tall-ish round building with a revolving restaurant at the top. While the restaurant we went to wasn’t in the top revolving portion, it still offered a spectacular view up at about level 60. They did very […]
4 November 2002
After arriving at Hong Kong’s international airport, we found the train to the city. At the city end of the ride, we had to transfer to connecting shuttle buses (included in the fare) to the Park Hotel. [Edit: in later years, we decided that the public bus is actually faster than the train if one […]
31 October 2002
Above: Last minute mending on the streets of Kunming. Today we leave China for Thailand. We started with a hotel breakfast in a garden-like setting. There was a good mix of Asian (congee, pau, red bean pastry etc) and Western (eggs, baked beans, toast etc). There was no western tea for Kim but only Chinese […]
30 October 2002
Above: At the markets. Kim’s mother rang us at the hotel this morning. She’s always interested and excited on our behalf when it comes to our travels. She’s always giving me newspaper clippings which she had collected from a long time ago, about interesting destinations. So perhaps she is living vicariously through us. I wanted […]
29 October 2002
Music from the CD shop started at 0900. The must have well-policed regulations about noise here. We took breakfast back at Sunshine Café, having scrambled eggs with ham and a fried egg with hashbrown (sharing halfway in our usual fashion). The Yunnan coffee was nice. Transport to Kunming, our last stop in China, involve a […]
28 October 2002
Today we moved south on to Dali, also in Yunnan province. It was disappointing to find that there was still on hot water when we woke. We washed using hot water from a vacuum flask and tap water. We taxied to the bus station and found a large IVECO van heading to Dali. Kim wasn’t […]
27 October 2002
Going up to 4506m The plan for the day was to go up to Jade Dragon Snow mountain. We found the bus stop to get there but the bus had just departed. It took about 40 mins to fill up till we could go but we remained productive by checking the bus schedule for our […]
26 October 2002
Flying via Kunming We woke at before 0500 and got ready for our 0700 flight. On the way, I tried getting money from the ATM again after having failed a few times last night. At the stop for the airport bus, we were accosted by a taxi driver who offered a ride to the airport […]
25 October 2002
Diarrhoea and Pandas Kim and I both woke up with diarrhoea this morning. Mine was a little less severe than his but in both cases, it wasn’t serious enough to cancel the day’s outing. We had organized a taxi to take us to the Panda Breeding Research Centre. The journey of about 35 mins cost […]