Tailors in Hoi An

After 16 hours on a bus up the coast we arrived in Hoi An a smaller
town known for all it's tailors. It was raining the whole day we got
here and the only thing we did was to go to the tailor. It's really
crap and I ordered a suit and five shirts. We also had time for a
first fitting and we have our second fitting at noon today so they are
really fast.

We are going to try to leave for Laos tomorrow if our clothes are done
by then. Then we have atlest 16 in a bus again before we reach
Savannakhet in Laos.

Mui Ne

So we have arrived in Vietnam and have already finished Saigon. Now we
are a few hours up the coast at a beach city called Mui Ne. It's a
real turist place with resorts all along the beach. Our plan here is
mostly to relax at the beach
>
> But today we went on a tour to the sand dunes around here. It was
> really fantastic. We could slide down the slopes and we got to see
> the sunset at re sand dunes. We also saw a really poisinous snake,
> we don't know the name of it but it's supposed to be really dangerous.

Bruce Lee

When we got back a tuk tuk driver who called himself Bruce Lee picked us up at the bus station. We had met him before we left for Angkor. He took us around Phnom Penh. We got to we the cruel S-21 prison and the mass graves from the civil war in the 70s. They had a big house where you could see the skulls from the victims they hard dug up from the mass graves. It can't understand how they can put them in display like they.

Later in the evening after we had dinner Bruce joined us for a couple of bears in the bar before we sad god buy to him. Today when we woke up it was raining so we stayed in bed late. Tomorrow we are leaving for Vietnam and I can hopefully find a wireless Internet so I can upload all the blog posts I have been writing on my iPhone.

Angkor

We went up to Angkor to see all the temples they have up there. It was really impressive to see them, they are huge. We saw all the big must see temples and we had our own tuk tuk driver that took us around the whole day. We only spent three days up there including the buss ride there and back to Phom Penh.

Change to the travel plan

So today was our last day in Hong Kong. We are sitting on the plane to Bangkok as I'm writing this. At first we had planned to stay in Hong Kong until Saturday and spend Friday on the beach but since Hong Kong was really expensive we decided we could spend that day on the beach in Vietnam instead and save the extra money it costs in Hong Kong. We also needed to switch hostel today (Thursday) since our reservation only was for 2 nights and the where fully booked after our reservation so we couldn't extend our stay.

So we woke up today with the intention of moving to another hostel for one night before taking the train on Friday. But it turned out we couldn't find a hostel this morning so talked about leaving today and we decided to look and see I'd we could find a cheap flight to Hanoi, Vietnam. Because if we would take the train to Vietnam it would take at least two days and 3 different trains and one bus just on the Chinese side. We found a flight to Hanoi through Bangkok that was cheap but then we couldn't book it online the same day so we had to go down to the airlines office downtown to book it directly from them. So we did that and also decided to only go to Bangkok and go through Laos to Vietnam and then down through Vietnam to Cambodia to Thailand.

After we had booked the flight we walked around on Kowloon island and Frida did some shopping. It was extremely hot so we went to an Internet cafe to try book a hostel for Bangkok. And while Frida did that I looked at the visa rules for Thailand and noticed you need and exit ticket to get a visa. So we has to rethink our plans again. Eventually we found a ticket to Cambodia for tomorrow so now we are going there instead. And then we'll  go up through Vietnam and Laos to Thailand. So it's almost the same plan but we are coming from the south instead.

We just started our resent for Bangkok and after our arrival we have 14 hours to kill before the next flight. We don't know how we will spend them yet but maybe at the airport but we have to see.

Hong Kong

So we arrived in Hong Kong after 20 hours on another train. Hong Kong wasn't as beautiful or clean as I had expected. We stayed on Hong Kong island where all the big skyscrapers are located. The hostel was fine but very small which is what you can expect in Hong Kong.

The first full day in Hong Kong was spent shopping and I bought myself a iPhone. In the evening we took the tram up to Victoria Peak to watch Victoria harbor in the sunset and later the light show they have there every night, "the symphony of lights". It was a real disappointment and not ass impressive as we thought it would be.

Forbidden City

Mao was greeting us when we arrived outside the Forbidden City in Beijing


It was beautiful inside...


...but extremely crowded.
It was a great artwork on the buildings.

You could see that the buildings was old.

They had a beautiful garden inside the Forbidden City as well.

.

A couple of day in Shanghai

So we are now in Shanghai, we arrived here on Friday after 12 hours on the train. The train ride was slow but not terrible. We took a night train but we didn't have a sleeper so we had to sit up all night. I also managed to get a cold on the train but it's almost over by now. So we have been here for a little more than two day now and I have to say that I like Beijing more than Shanghai but Frida likes Shanghai more. There isn't much to see here in Shanghai so we are leaving for Hong Kong on Monday. The by far the best thing we have done here in Shanghai is going up in the 492 m (1,614.2 ft) high Shanghai World Finance Center, it's the second tallest building in the world and has the highest roof of any building in the world. We could go up to three different levels. If you look at the picture below on the skyscraper you can see that there is a hole in the top of the building, one of the levels where right under the hole and the highest right above it. At the top level you could walk on glass and look straight down to the ground, it was really amazing a little scary at first but a really great experience. We went up after sunset so we could see the lights of almost the whole Shanghai and all the other skyscrapers around it looked small compared to it.

Shanghai World Finance Center

SWFC with 421 m (1,380 ft) high Jin Mao Tower in front

(421 m (1,380 ft) with the spire)

Me 474 m (1,555 ft) up in the Shanghai World Finance Center

Frida in the SWFC

View of Shanghai from the SWFC

Another view from the SWFC

Changing wheels in the train

When we arrived to Chine with the train they had to change wheels since China is running on smaller tracks than Russia and Mongolia. We where still on the train while they did this and here are some pictures that shows the process.

Great Wall

Our guide

Me on the Great Wall

Our group

Me again

"He who has not climbed the Great Wall is not a true man"

So the stay in Beijing is almost over. Tomorrow the train are leaving for Shanghai but after almost a week in Beijing we have seen most of the things that are worth seeing. We have seen the Forbidden city, the Great wall, the Lama temple, the Temple of heaven, the Olympic stadiums and much more.

Today we went to the Great Wall of China we went to the secret wall, that's what the hostel called it. It is a part of the wall that's not rebuilt  where no tourist are going. We where 20 people from our hostel that went there, it took 2.5 hours with mini buss so it was a long car ride there an back but it was so worth it. We were the only one's on the wall so you could get pictures with no one on them which is impossible on the rebuilt walls. We passed a couple of them on the way out at they were packed with people. So we walked of the wall for almost 3 hours before we went down and got lunch in a locale village. After we had walked for 1.5 hours and where at the highest point we found a guy sitting there selling souvenirs so he has to walk up there everyday to just sit there and wait for the few people that comes there. So it was a great day the the quote in the headline comes from Mao Zedong and is something everybody should live after, don't you think?

Second day in Beijing

So we have spent 2 days in Beijing now, well we arrived at 2.30 p.m. yesterday so almost 2 days. The train ride here was much better than the last one, primary because it wasn't so long only 30 hours. The train was much better as well it looked brand new so that was good the only downside was that we couldn't open the window so we had to take pictures through the glass. The landscape was beautiful with mountains and rice fields. The last couple of hours we went trough tunnel after tunnel and every time we came out on the tunnel the landscape was fantastic and we even got to see the Great Wall.

When we arrived at the train station we decided to walk to the hostel which took about 30 minutes so that wasn't to bad. But since we carried our big backpacks people saw that we just arrived and one guy just came up and sad "welcome to China" and he followed us for the next 10 minutes speaking English. And when we where almost at the hostel another guy came up and asked where we where from so we sad Sweden and he just "ooh and worked in Stockholm for sic months" and we talked to him for a while. Everybody is so friendly here and if they can speak English they love to speak it with a foreigner. So we got a really got first impression of Beijing with the people and the traffic is much more organised here than in Russian and Mongolia.

Today we have been walking for at least 6 hours, we spent the first 5 hours of the day shopping at Xidan one of the biggest shopping streets in Beijing. And when we got back to the hostel we met Pablo a Spanish guy we met at the hostel in Ulaanbaatar. So he joined us when we went out looking for something to eat. We ate at a market where they sell grilled food on sticks (pictures are coming) and they had everything, chicken, beef, lam, fruit, sea food, starfish and even different bugs and scorpions. We bought beef, lamp and some grilled corn and left the bugs for someone else. And we also walked to the biggest square in the world (that's what our guidebook told us) and we also saw one of the old city gates. After that we found a shopping street but I guess the Chinese didn't think it looked good enough before so they have rebuilt all the facades of the building and rebuilt them, it look really fake. But we guessed they want it too look new and that it was a thing they did for the Olympics even thou there where no stores get.

A trip to the country side

We just got back after at two day trip to the country side of Mongolia. It's supposed to be really beautiful and I have to agree. The trip started on Tuesday and when we woke up we saw that it was raining outside but before we left it had changes into snowing. SNOWING! I didn't expect to see snow on this trip but I guess I had my hopes up for nothing. So when we got out to the National park to do some hiking it was extremely foggy and the wind was blowing and it was really cold. It turned out to be more car riding than hiking which was fine by us. After we had seen the things we where supposed to see we tried to drive to the family where we would spend the night. After 4 hours of driving around trying to find there winter camp (they are nomads, moving around on the country side) we met another group that told us we couldn't drive up to there camp because of the snow so we went to another camp. It felt like this camp was out in nowhere but we finally got there after driving thru the snow, we didn't even see the road. And we were driving a small Hyundai that had front-wheel drive, and we drove off-road with it (and I really med OFF-road). So we spent the night in a ger, a typical Mongolian tent. We didn't have any heat so we had a fire at the beginning of the night so the temperature most have been up to 30 degrease when we went to bed and close to 0 degrease when we woke up.

So today we went horseback riding thru the snow. It was fun but really cold. I succeeded at riding even though I haven't done it since I was maybe 10 at a zoo. At first my horse refused to move faster than 3 km/h but after a while it decided to hurry up a bit. So we went to an old temple ground from the 16th century but the temples was tern down by the Soviet when they had control of Mongolia. It was so cold outside that we decided to not take the horses back but the car so now we are sitting here at the hostel in Ulaanbaatar our last night before we are boarding the train for Beijing.

Photos from the train

Lollo, Daniel and Anna is playing volleyball at the Russian border station
Russian railway worker
Outside the window right before Mongolia
This is our train
Some people brought a lot of baggage
Two Chinese from the train

Around Irkutsk
Around Irkutsk
Houses in Russia
Bright coloured houses in Russian
The last stop in Russian before the border station

Our cabin
Early morning in Russia
Sunrise over the Baikal sea

A train station in Russia
Everybody tries to buy some food at one of the stops.

Russian workers are loading coal so we could get hot water to our samovar
Lollo and Frida is buying food
A Russian lady tries to sell food
Food for sale
Our train

First round of pictures from Moscow

Kremlin
Cathedral on the Red sq
Cathedral on the Red sq
Lenin's thomb
Russia's "undknown solider"
Traffic congestion (looked like this all over Moscow)

This is where we got our Mongolian Visa
Me on the Red sq