Our Rajasthan journey has taken us to Jodhpur – the last major city before reaching Pakistan (the border is less than 200 miles away). Jodhpur is known as the “Blue City”. It has this name because of the paint color used on so many of the buildings.
We are currently on an all-night train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. This is the sixth night we will spend on a train during our journey.
After taking an all-night train to Chiang Mai, we spent a couple of days exploring the many temples in town and enjoying the night markets and food. We then took a public bus and taxi to Tha Ton, near the border with Myanmar.
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.
We took a 17 day family trip to Japan in June 2002. It was the first time the girls had been to Asia, so it was a quite different experience for them.
We began our second week in Japan by visiting Kyoto and the wonderful temples in the city. Also included in our time there was a day trip to Nara.
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 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.
We are now in Kunming, which is in the southwest corner of China, very close to the Laos and Vietnam borders.
