The story so far ......

I mentioned to the Red Terror at the weekend that I had started this blog and seeing as she’s has now sprung my act I figured I should probably put something else in …. it’s ONLY been 11 days though !!! ( the ‘addictive’ part hasn’t kicked in yet )

Part of the hold up has been working out what pictures to put in …. or not put in. One of the pro’s or con’s – however you want to look at it – of owning a digital camera is the volume of pictures you can end up with …. From our last trip we came back with nearly 5500 pics !

Anyway …… I was going to say a bit about me …. But unlike someone else I know it isn’t ALL about me so I will do that a bit later … so the this one is going to be a bit about places we’ve been fortunate enough to visit – I will start going into a bit more detail about each place from the next entry ( when I have had a proper chance to go through some of the pics and archives)

So ….. in order, we have had the chance to see –

2004

Singapore – Beautiful place, oppressively hot in summer though so be prepared if you go over the Xmas period ! There are definitely things to see and do but nothing that I would consider a ‘must see’ and personally I think more than a week there would have you climbing the walls but like anything, it’s up to the individual and what they are looking for in a holiday. Most certainly worth going to .

Egypt - Well this one speaks for itself really ! What an introduction to the world of travel. To stand in the shadow of some of the biggest and most famous man made monuments in the world truly is breath taking. We started this trip in Cairo ( which on first impressions struck me as the most polluted place on earth but at that stage we had not been to Beijing !) and travelled nearly 1000km down the Nile to Aswan. A must see destination – I would advise against women travelling alone though !!

2005

New York – One word – BIG ! Everything in New York is big ! We had 10 days here and even though we walked for kilometre after kilometre in that time I doubt we even scratched the surface. We were there in their winter and even though it was the off season the number of tourists was overwhelming. You sort of don’t notice them though until you try to get into some of the attractions and find yourself in a queue that is easily over half a kilometre long.

Paris – Paris is the most beautiful city on the face of the earth in my (limited) experience. Contrary to popular belief we found the locals to be anything but rude and arrogant – in fact, if you make even the slightest effort to speak the language ( basic greetings ) we found that people went out of their way to be polite and helpful. Way too much to say about this place to give an abbreviated opinion so I will cover Paris properly later

London – Hmmmmm …… London….. it may have been the fact that we were both unwell and extremely tired after very late last night in Paris followed by a very early flight out of Charles De Gaulle and/or the fact that we had never been so cold in our lives ( again, pre China) but London really didn’t rock our world. To it’s credit we probably went at a REALLY bad time of year – early January – but we just found everything about the place to be grey …. The sky, the streets, the buildings and the people. I would like to go back there at a different time of year to see if the perception is different but I doubt that it would be anything other than a stop over on the way to somewhere else.

Tokyo – Those crazy Japanese ! As a city, Tokyo is astronomically big. We stayed in a district called Roppongi which, according to the local advertising, is a ‘high touch town’ ….. I suspect something may have been lost in translation because (fortunately) nobody tried to touch us either high or low ! :-) I would love to see more of rural Japan – Tokyo is interesting and most certainly full on but I think that the more traditional areas probably have a lot more to offer. One thing that Tokyo definitely is though is EXPENSIVE with a capital $$$ …. In the search to find milk on day we ended up in a pseudo supermarket which had a rockmelon for sale at about $147 and meat ( a fairly unexciting cut of beef) which worked out to almost $300/kg ….. plan for a short time there or save your pennies well in advance.

2006

Beijing - THIS is the most polluted place on earth ! How they are going to be ready for the Olympics is beyond me. They do have an action plan apparently which involves shutting all industry down in the lead up to and for the duration of the Games and when you can drive during that time will be dictated by you licence plate number but sadly there doesn’t appear to be any plan ( or even interest in ) decreasing the level of pollution permanently. Once you see through the smog though Beijing is a great city with some incredible sights.

Harbin & Shanghai - Although very different to Beijing these two tie into the whole China experience so I will fill in the gaps later on.

So that’s a ‘brief’ overview of things so far….. I will try to get some more detail started on Egypt (with pics) sooner than it took to get this one done….. plus a bit on what’s up next.