We had to replan the last few days of our holiday due to the protests in Hong Kong. The train we had booked to Hong Kong stopped in Guangzhou (Canton) so we decided to get off there instead and explore the surrounding area.
We spent the first day in Guangzhou itself. We went to some of the major tourists sites during the day (the Chen Ancestral Hall and Shamian island), then went over to a Westernised part of town for dinner in the evening.
We stopped over in Kunming for a night before getting a long bus down to Yuanyang to look at the rice terraces. The final stretch of our travel that day was a taxi, which was certainly an experience: after much confusion we ended up barelling through the mountains on three wheels, in a half-hour ride that was equal parts amusement and terror.
We got up early the following morning to look at the terraces in the sunrise.
We got to Lijiang via a short internal flight from Chengdu. This was a picturesque small town in the valley of the mountains, and we had a nice relaxing day wandering round the historic centre and parks
After that we spent a couple of days hiking Tiger Leaping Gorge, one of the deepest gorges in the world. The mountain pass we walked for the first couple of days was gentle, but the views were incredible.
Pandas!
We started out with the babies…
…then went to visit the adults, just before they set down to eat in a totally normal way…
Eating like that is tiring, so they took a post-prandial snooze…
…before continuing with the social activities for the day…
I took many more photos of the pandas, some of which are quite good. We went to see the red pandas, where I had less photographic success (new camera etc.
We took a high speed train out of Beijing towards Xi’an, but stopped off for a day’s hike up Huashan along the way. This is one of many sacred mountains in China (this one Daoist); we would manage two in this trip. Most visitors here go up by cable car and visit two of the four peaks (which does involve a reasonable amount of climbing between them), but we were full of energy and decided to do all four peaks all on foot in one day.
We took a short flight over from Seoul to Beijing, and had a pretty smooth experience getting o our hostel. We arrived too late in the day to see any of the sights. Since we didn’t have any plans for places to eat either, we were pleased to see that one of the top-recommended restuarants by Eater in Beijing was a somewhat upmarket vegetarian restuarant. After a bizarre experience trying to find it (15 minutes wandering dark, mostly residential alleys) someone from the restaurant spotted our confusion and guided us in.
We spent a week overall in South Korea - half in Seoul, half in Jeju -, and we met up with our friends (hi Frandy!) while we were there. We visited a number of the main sights in Seoul, including Changgyeonggung Palace, Bukchon Hanok Village, and Namdaemun Market. We ate some good korean food (bibimbap, buchimgae) but we also drank beer and watched rugby. Seoul is a huge city, though, and it did feel like we needed a lot more time to explore the city properly.
We spent a good few hours in the Peace Memorial Museum on our first morning in Hiroshima. This covers the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and the aftermath. It’s hard to write about this, but it was very harrowing. I think the museum did a good justice to a difficult topic. It probably goes something towards describing it by saying that it was one of the busiest museums I’ve been in, but you could have heard a pin drop nonetheless.
We had planned to go on to the Kumano Kodo trail after Kyoto, but Typhoon Hagibis took out the train line down to the start point of our hike, so we made some last-minute alterations. We went over to Osaka the day the typhoon hit, but the weather was (unsuprisingly) quite bad so we weren’t able to do much. We tried to visit the castle and a history museum but both were closed, so we gave up and spent the rest of the day inside.
Any first-time trip to Japan has to involve Kyoto, so we duly did that after Kanazawa. We arrived early evening and went for a walk around the Imperial Palace. These were nice, but the main sight was the incredible red sunset, that this photo barely does justice to:
next day was a marathon of temples. We started off in Southern Higashiymam, visiting kiyomizu-dera. This was definitely impressive, but both the temple and the run-up were really busy so it was difficult to appreciate fully (and to take a good photo).
We took the shinkansen up to Nagano from Tokyo early on the Thursday morning, then switched to a (very sickly) bus journey in to a valley called Kamikochi deeper in the Japanese alps. We arrived around lunchtime and after dropping off our bags did our first walk up to dakesawa hut. This a waypoint on to much more ambitious climbs on to Mount Hotakadake, but those were definitely not on our radar.
We stayed in Tokyo for five nights. Since we arrived late on Saturday night, and after a long flight we could only really manage a sandwich at the hotel bar before crashing for a solid 13 hours.
Sunday was our first chance to actually explore. We focussed on places near Asakusa, which is where we are staying. Our first impression of Tokyo architecture was the Tokyo Sky Tree and the Asahi Brewery Headquarters.