Category Archives for Places
Among the unremarkable apartment blocks of Ping Fan, an unremarkable suburb of Harbin, sits an unremarkable low brick building, muted against the snow. This is 731. The base of Unit 731, home to some of the worst atrocities in this part of China during World War II, a place where men, women, babies and children [...]
What’s it like seeing the Harbin ice sculptures when you’ve dreamed of seeing them for over a decade? Jaw-dropping. The Harbin ice sculptures are the largest ice festival on earth, by miles. And pictures can’t begin to capture the scale, the blaze of colour. You wander, snow crunching under your boots, past gigantic ice palaces, [...]
The Songhua River
One of the few details of primary school history that sticks in my brain – well, apart from Elizabethans using white lead on their faces and only bathing once a year – is the great fairs that were held on the Thames during the Little Ice Age. The river used to freeze so hard that [...]
Ocean Park! Woot!
If there’s a better place to celebrate FINALLY scoring a Chinese visa than Ocean Park Hong Kong – at least when you’re a single mother and a twelve-year-old boy – I’d like to hear about it. OK, so I had my eye on the very reasonably priced lunch buffet at the Shangri-La, — with, fact [...]
Ice Skating in Beijing
When it comes to ice skating, like everything else, the Chinese do it differently. Very differently. And ice skating in Beijing is really something else. Especially on Qianhai Lake. It’s not just the unavoidable presence of the PLA, whether riding ice dodgems, guarding ice bikes, administering the ice slide or guarding the ice skates. The [...]
Pictures of Nepal
I may have spent the last few posts bitching and whining about Kathmandu, but… We did, honestly, love Nepal. So here’s my favourite pictures of Nepal. The alpenglow catches Everest behind Nuptse, seen from Kala Patthar. A man selling coloured powders for ritual purposes in Kathmandu. And an offering to Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, made [...]
The Best Sunrise Ever?
Everest Base Camp The Lazy Way: Day 10-12 – Gokyo Ri It’s difficult to describe quite how insanely beautiful the landscape around Gokyo is. Reflecting glacier lakes, some frozen so hard you can skate on them, stack up towards the base of Cho Oyu, the sixth highest mountain in the world. So I’ll just say [...]
The Biggest Stupa in Asia?
“Look!” I say, coaxingly. “It’ll be interesting! It’s the biggest stupa in Asia! We have to see that, right?” “Oh, alright!” says my spawn. (Neither of us are at our best with colds.) “Yeah, I guess we do have to see that.” “And,” I interject rapidly. “There’s this other Hindu temple that’s very famous, on [...]
First Impressions of Kathmandu
The term “sensory overload” could have been designed for Kathmandu, a medieval hill city, dirt poor, rich in ritual, dragging its ass into the twenty-first century in a clutter of motorbikes and mass tourism, the air a rich soup of dust, vehicle emissions, riverside cremations and burning plastic, of incense, joss sticks, cardamom and, yes, [...]
Zac is well on the mend from his surgery. But not enough to do many of his favourite things, or even ride a motorbike — and most of his friends are away. That sucks. You see, a lot of Zac’s favourite things for kids to do in Bali are on the active side. Neither of [...]
