Travel | An Unweeded Garden

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Hanging Temple

December 21, 2012

An hour or so from Datong, through dusty villages, where houses are still built of mud and donkeys draw carts laden with melons, is a temple that has clung to the side of a mountain for more than 1,500 years. Unsurprisingly, it’s known as the hanging temple… Now, I’m not much of a one for […]

Yungang Grottoes – in pictures

December 18, 2012

UNESCO has a decent track record in choosing places worth seeing, and we headed off to one of their World Heritage sites, the Yungang Grottoes, first thing in the morning, hoping to be able to see these and The Hanging Temple in the same day, which is easily done from Datong. Started in the 5th […]

Datong – Shanxi Province

December 15, 2012

Datong is a gritty kind of town. It’s coal country – and arriving at the station in the dead of night did nothing to change our opinion that catching a train from Hohhot in Inner Mongolia into Datong was something of a risk. Not least because there are several stations called Datong and China’s paranoia […]

Hohhot – images of Inner Mongolia

December 9, 2012

China may be a single entity, but it has a great variety of people and peoples within its vast borders. Alongside the 22 provinces (23 if you count Taiwan), there is a spattering of Special Economic Zones (2), 4 Municipalities and 5 Autonomous Regions. It’s often these latter that court controversy as the people of […]

Terracotta Warriors

December 6, 2012

I remember going Christmas shopping once with my sister and, as we walked through the John Lewis kitchen department, no doubt in search of some delightful present for some lucky family member, it dawned on me that I could plot a path through the shelves in such a way as to arrive quite suddenly in […]

Xian – Terracotta Warriors & Hua Shan

December 3, 2012

If you’re going to visit anywhere outside of Beijing, Xian and the Terracotta warriors have to be high on the list of priorities. Earlier in the summer I had planned to go there with my sister and her boyfriend. For one reason or another that came to nothing – just as well, perhaps, as she […]