After a pleasant few days in Diu it was time to move on. My next stop was Bombay (as it was still known then). Nowadays I would have no hesitation in finding a cheap flight but then it was another long distance trudge by road and rail. It started with an overnight bus journey to Ahmedabad. It wasn’t an auspicious start as I noted we only moved 8kms in the first hour and although the bus was only one third…
So I was waiting at the bus stop in Jaisalmer waiting for the bus to Barmer bathed in sweat. It was a fairly short hop of 2 hours. But once in Barmer, I noted that after the relatively clean streets of Jaisalmer I was back to the stench and pollution of a big Indian city and reflected that it wasn’t so much of a surprise that there was currently an outbreak of bubonic plague. From Barmer I took an overnight…
From Amritsar I took the overnight train to Delhi, quickly changing to another for Sawai Madupur. I must have been pretty hardy in those days or just in a mad hurry because I didn’t even stay a night there before heading off to Jaipur. But I digress. The reason for going to Sawai Madupur was to visit the Ranthambore National Park and spot a tiger. My diary says I got a pony and trap from the train station to the tourist office…
After my trip to India in 2016, I managed to dig out the photos of a previous trip I did in 1994. It was over 20 years ago but I am still amazed at the changes that have taken place over the years. Not just on the ground in India but also because it was a time before digital cameras, so I had to scan my old photos from a yellowing photo album. I’m not sure how many I took…
My time in China was almost at an end. On Monday morning I was off on the bus to Pakistan. Gathering in the foyer of the hotel was a bunch of foreigners also going. There were three British girls, the Chinese/American I had met before, an American from Beijing with his Chinese wife, one Japanese guy and one other American. We all handed our passports in and waited. When the bus appeared there was a huge scrum of locals. The…
The southernmost metropolis of China’s New Frontier, Kashgar (Kāshí) has been the epicentre of cultural conflict and cooperation for over two millennia. Modernity has swept in like a sandstorm. A paved Silk Road preceded an airport and in 1999 the Iron Rooster arrived, along with many Han Chinese. Taxis and motorbikes are everywhere, and much of the old architecture is giving way to the new. This is the guidebook description from 2010. It was very different 17 years earlier. After…
After my mini lie-in I got the 10am bus for the relatively short 4 hour hop to Urumqi (20Y). The bus dropped us off in the middle of nowhere but I was able to get a 3-wheeler to the Hongsham Hotel where I got a room for 45Y with the world’s smallest bath. I needed to get some laundry done and the hotel staff weren’t interested but fortunately there was a laundry across the road. I went for a wander…
13th April, Lanzhou. I decided that rather than go back to the train station, I would try a few travel agents to get my train ticket to Jiayuguan. After trying a few and a bit of bargaining I got a place on a train at 11.30am tomorrow, arriving at 6.15am the day after for 130 Y + 30Y commission. The times are pretty good and I get a bit of time to rest up after my exhausting time in Tibet….
I was living in Hong Kong at the time. Or rather I’d just been transfered to Sydney but managed to get a two month break in order to do an epic journey from Chengdu, skirting the Tibetan plateau north, west across the border with Mongolia and Russia and then south to Kashgar and across the Karakoram mountains into Pakistan. It was April 1993. Almost 30 years later, I’ve dug up my old diary and scanned the photos and this is…
This was a trip I did in December 1992 in South West China. Xishuangbanna is an autonomous prefecture in China’s southwestern Yunnan province, bordering Myanmar and Laos. It’s known for Dai culture, distinctive temples and tropical rainforests. I was living in Hong Kong at the time and went with my friend Ingrid. First up we got the overnight ferry to Guangdong, headed to the airport and then got the flight to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. That was the…