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I’m now working in IT which is mostly good fun so I don’t have much time for blogging anymore. I’m also learning a lot of new technologies too which is interesting. In fact the only reason I have time now is that I’m heading up to Manchester by train to meet up with a good [...]

After a good nights sleep we awake to be crossing the Gobi Desert, this is a pretty large desert in the south of Mongolia, we saw quite a bit of wildlife including sheep and deer as well as some traditional Mongolain yurts – it was mostly just scrubland. However there did appear to mostly be [...]

I don’t have time to write much tonight, but I should at least begin writing some more content. We left Beijing early on the 4th March. First we actually headed south, but mostly west through beautiful mountains to the West of Beijing, unfortunately I was tired so I took a nap – though I should [...]

On my final day (Monday) in Shanghai I first had to buy some new shoes. My “bargain” shoes from New Zealand which cost NZ$25 (£8) turned out to be not so great and they were still so wet in the morning that I had to borrow the orange plastic flip flops from my hostel to [...]

On my second last day in Shanghai I headed over to the gardens of Suzhou. I left on the 10.30am train after getting my Xi’An ticket and sitting around for the requisite amount of time. I got to go first class as well which was nice but unnecessary. It was my own fault though as [...]

Note that £1=¥9.71, $1=¥6.84 On Thursday I relaxed in the morning in my private room – the first since Cambodia and the last for the rest of my trip before catching the train to Shanghai. For breakfast I had a “British breakfast which consisted of fried eggs and tomato and orange juice and tea which [...]

After the museum the next day I just chilled out in Kuala Lumpur and read the excellent book Absolute Power. This is about an American president who has rough sex with a woman which goes too far and she lands up dead. The problem is that there is a witness; a three times convicted burgler [...]

I got up at 7am on Saturday to head on the train to Hiroshima. It’s clear at this point that the New Year which is the Japanese equivalent to Christmas has begun and there is a lazy atmosphere in the air. First I headed to Kyoto station to leave my baggage before catching the slowest [...]

I headed out to castle Himeji on boxing day morning, heading to Himeji mostly on the Shinkansen and changing 3 times on the way. Himeji is unsurprisingly another boring town though it has it’s good points. Firstly they rent free bikes to allow you to explore the town. This wasn’t that useful but did enable [...]

So I arrived into Kyoto late on Sunday and in the evening I uploaded a whole bunch of stuff to Flickr which carried on after midnight and so in the morning I had a lie in and got up pretty late too. First I had a wander around town and went down one of the [...]