My Great China Tour

On Saturday morning I sent off my passport and form for a visa for China. I used an agency I often go past on the way to the British Library from Euston station. It was unnecessarily expensive because they demanded payment by postal order which seems an archaic way of paying anyone these days - and the post office demanded payment for that by cash. It was like stepping back a couple of decades. But anyway, it is now done.

Just the final bookings have to be made now. But at the moment my route through China is probably going to look like this:

Day 1: Manchester - Paris. Depart Paris.
Day 2: Arrive in Hong Kong. Hong Kong - Hangzhou
Day 3: Hangzhou
Day 4: Hangzhou
Day 5: Hangzhou
Day 5: Hangzhou - Shanghai.
Day 6: Shanghai
Day 7: Shanghai- Suzhou- Shanghai.
Day 8: Shanghai - Chongqing
Day 9: Chongqing
Day 10: Depart Chongqing (by soft-sleeper)
Day 11: Arrive Yizhou.
Day 12: Yizhou - Guilin
Day 13: Guilin- Guangzhou
Day 14: Guangzhou
Day 15: Guangzhou - HongKong
Day 16: Hong Kong
Day 17: HongKong-Paris-Manchester


I have shown it with black arrows on the map above (starting near the east coast). Yizhou is only an approximate position - in reality it is closer to Guilin than I have drawn it.

Looking at that I wish I were still going to Khotan in the northwest territories, but in order to get there I would have to fly into Urumqi - and there was yet more rioting there over the weekend. So maybe I have made the best decision...but I would have loved to have stepped out onto the Mongolia plains and into a yurt. Urumqi itself looks an amazing city. It is the most inland city in the world, and a photograph I saw of it showed gleaming skyscrapers against a background of glorious high icy mountains.

Instead I shall be heading south towards the South China seas. It is a fertile place, with sub-tropical forest covering the strange isolated peaks of limestone, and then, nearer the sea... more gleaming skyscrapers.