Email: Greetings from El Valle, Panama
When last we wrote we were in Panama City making do with the extreme weather and the havoc it was reaping on our plans.
When last we wrote we were in Panama City making do with the extreme weather and the havoc it was reaping on our plans.
We are currently on a bus back to Chiang Mai. We’ve spent the last week in the north near where the boarders of Thailand, Myanmar (Burma) and Laos meet.
China is a unique destination and we spent three weeks exploring this country. Our goal was to go from Beijing to Hong Kong, relying primarily on trains.
Yesterday we went to the Great Wall. It is a portion of the wall that sees very few visitors. With all the buses and subway, it cost us Y66 or $7 per person. Pulling the whole thing off wasn’t easy though.
We left Beijing’s West Train Station at 12:45pm on Wednesday to begin our ten hour journey to Luoyang. We were able to get hard seats (for about $12 each) on a ‘K’ train, which is an express that makes very few stops.
It was a 5 1/2 hour journey on a double decker express ‘K’ train from Luoyang to Xian. The next morning we went back to the train station to catch the bus to the Army of the Terracotta Warriors. Nothing prepares you for the enormity of seeing the warriors in lines as you first enter.
It is Thursday night and we are in Luoyang, which is southwest of Beijing. We arrived here late last night after a 10 hour train ride in “hard class.” Hard class is not necessarily the seats (they were padded) but it refers to the cheapest seats of travel – one the Chinese use.
After some rough traveling, we first visited the pandas in Chengdu and then relaxed in Dali. Among the highlights there was a visit to a local market.
My butt hurts and it’s only one hour into our 17 hour train ride from Xian to Chengdu. We only expected to spend two days in Xian but we had to stay three days because there weren’t any seats available to Chengdu.
After leaving the relaxation of Dali, we visited Kunming, another large Chinese city. The major highlight of this visit was a day trip to the Stone Forest.