When in China, you need to know your SARs from your SARS and indeed your SERs. The middle one is a rather nasty disease from an alien spore that took out hundreds across Hong Kong alone. The former are Special Administrative Regions such as Hong Kong, Macau and Tibet. “One country, two systems” according to read on ..

We took a slow book through China down the Yangtze River from Chongqing to Yichang, 3 nights on a boat surrounded by Western tourists. There was a very good reason for this seemingly irrational behaviour: to see the world’s largest dam before it is finished, before it changes the face of the Yangtze and the read on ..

Train 2, City 5. Armed this time WITH toilet paper we rolled slowly to Xi’an on the sleeper. Alas a poor young Dutch couple who were also on the Yangtze cruise boat boarded the train too … they were very sweet about it all and showed enormous patience as the kids latched onto them like read on ..