Travel photos and journals from across Asia [1997-2026]
An early start and a cab across town dropped us at the G8 Sapa Tour office, where we were booked on a bus to the tourist hotspot. Buses in Vietnam have come a long way, and this one had 24 bed-cabins in which to comfortably spend the six-hour journey to Sapa. The journey went by…
The China Eastern flight and transit through Kunming and Hanoi airports could not have been quicker or smoother. We were in our apartment in downtown Hanoi by mid-afternoon and sitting in the famous train street with a cold beer an hour later. This major tourist spot is where the trains heading into Ga Hanoi pass…
Another early start began with dragging a trolley laden with suitcases through the desolated morning streets of Lijiang’s old town to the road access point, where we jumped into a couple of cabs to the station for the four-hour train back to Kunming. After a bit of faffing around with taxis, we got to our…
Our last day in Lijiang was spent exploring the parts of the sprawling seven-square-kilometer ancient town that we hadn’t seen yet. We wandered through the relatively quiet morning streets to the Heilong Park, or Black Dragon Pool, for some spectacular views of the lakes, pagodas, and Jade Dragon Snow Mountain backdrop. Locals were hand-feeding squirrels,…
Today’s excursion would be done manually without a tour, so we were up early again and off to the station to grab a train an hour and a half north to Shangri-la, a place mythically meaning paradise, utopia, or heaven. The good thing about being up and about before dawn is that it’s the best…
We booked this tour on Trip dot com as it was virtually impossible for foreigners to secure the tickets to the cable car, which is extremely popular. Yulong Snow Mountain, or Jade Dragon Mountain as it is also known, is an imposing set of peaks, the highest at 5,596 meters, overlooking Lijiang. It is a…
We were up early and over to the sprawling Kunming station to take a bullet train north to Lijiang. Trains can be booked online and are very reasonably priced. Our C86 left at 10.30 on the dot and took 3.5 hours; boarding was done by scanning our passports, no tickets required. The weather had turned…
Our last road trip to Georgia was becoming a distant memory, so that meant we needed another one. China is a place I’ve always wanted to visit, but have always been deterred by the visa hassles. Things are changing for the better, though, and a ten-day transit visa was possible at the time we booked…