China Update

As we leave China I feel I should do a short update. We are three weeks into our new adventure now and coming towards the end of our first organised tour. I am writing this from a bullet train en-route to Hong Kong, which although part of China in name doesn’t seem to be in many other respects, so in my mind we are about to leave China. It still hasn’t sunk in that this is not just a holiday, I think maybe when we get to Mongolia it will start to.

I mentioned we are three weeks in now, and I have only posted blogs about the first week we were away so far. Basically because we are on an organised tour at the moment, things have been pretty action packed, with only a day or a couple of days in each place and we haven’t had a lot of spare time to do things like sit and write blogs. We have obviously had our long train journeys, which is where I have been doing the majority of my blogging.

We have a week in Hong Kong by ourselves and although I thoroughly intend to explore Hong Kong, we will be taking it at a much slower pace and we will be in the same place. I intend to try to get up to date with this blog, which will hopefully mean that there are quite a few posts coming in the next week. I am hoping I don’t flood Facebook or people’s feeds too much BUT on the other hand when we get to Mongolia I don’t expect to get internet very often, so maybe if you are interested in reading all my posts you could space them out so that while I am in Mongolia there wont be a massive gap.

I also wanted to mention the terrible flooding that has been happening in China. I don’t know whether it has reached western news, but there has been massive rainfall all over China over the past week or so. Our group has been incredibly lucky to avoid the flooding, we are all ok and people shouldn’t worry for our safety.

However we visited Yangshuo just after their flood had subsided, and although I plan to write a full blog about it, I will say now that it was heartbreaking to see peoples’ livelihoods out on the street to dry or in piles of rubbish to be thrown away. Insurance is not an option for the majority of these people and some of them have lost so much. Having said that everyone seemed to be pulling together to help clean up the town and put it back together.

Our guide also told us that the rain in Beijing had been so bad that groups starting today would not be able to visit The Great Wall, The Forbidden City or a number of other attractions in Beijing. As upsetting as it would be to arrive and find out you couldn’t visit these sites (and believe me it could have really ruined my time here) it must be devastating to the locals.

On that slightly sobering note, I will catch up with you in Hong Kong.