China: Plane or Train

According to the Rough Guide, the price of a Soft Sleeper on the train (example pictured below) is about the same as a flight. I'm really tempted to fly in order to see more in the 3 weeks we'll be there, perhaps taking the train just once or twice. I have to confess that the main problems with the train is the toilets. From what I've learned, it's a case of 'first up, best dressed' - the soft sleepers don't have their own toilets, and if you want to be more sure of a clean start to the day, you need to get there first. Otherwise, all bets are off.



It wouldn't be a big deal for me if I were traveling on my own, but with wife and kids, the levels to which I'm prepared to descend are limited.

There's also the consideration of time saved. Instead of a 12 hour overnight trip to Xian from Beijing, for example, we're talking about a 2 hour flight. Perhaps a mix would be best - sticking with the train where I'm fairly sure the quality and cleanliness is likely to be high.

Home Swapping

One of the ways of minimizing the cost of a trip like this (I'm summarize them all in a post later in the year) was the idea of home swaps. Up until recently it's been very much a theoretical proposition, though one that is built in to our budget! Having looked at a number of different sites, we had been slowly coming round to the idea that it would remain theoretical. It seemed that there was no really good match out there for us, and in any case the awkwardness of our requirements would have excluded us from normal home swappers.

But we took a few pictures of the house, and signed up to homelink. I had heard them on the radio a few months back, and I liked the sound of them. It's an international group (they claim to be the biggest) but very importantly each country has its own local grouping and management. This is what makes the difference. I was able to pick up the phone and talk to Marie in Dublin and get all my questions answered before I decided to commit. Due to a minor problem with their web site (don't use Firefox) I couldn't pay online, but Marie went ahead and uploaded my profile (trusting me to ring back the next morning with my credit card details).

I hadn't even made it into the office today when a phone call came in from our first potential match in Australia. It didn't quite suit, but the important thing about homelink is that if you have the time, you can enter into correspondence with any other member and tell them in detail what you're looking for. Because we have still got 8 months to before we're off, I'm feeling a little more confident that we'll find something to fill the three gaps in our programme: Sydney, NZ North Island (tbd) and NZ South Island (also tbd).

More on this as I learn about it.

Kids Passports Part II

Just a quick update to say that getting the kids' passports, including German-born Nina's, was a piece of cake. The only glitch was an error that the Passport Office made in setting Sara's date of birth, but they fixed it free of charge and free of fuss.

The result is a pair of all-grown-up passports for a 6 and 8 year old, complete with their own rather absurd, but cute, signatures.

Full marks for the Passport Office.

Review of Jared Diamond’s Book "Collapse"

This book makes gripping and important reading. It is balanced and builds a cohesive model of the parameters that can predict our own success or failure as a society.

Review of product: Jared Diamond’s "Collapse".

Rated as 4/5 on Apr 03 2007 by Brendan Lawlor

One of the really refreshing things about this book and this author is that he is playing to nobody’s tune but his own. He acknowledges from the outset that what he has to say will please neither those who assume that modern technological society is inherently wicked, nor those who feel it is blameless for our current state of affairs, ecologically speaking.

The book charts the success or failure of various human societies in the past and the modern age, compares them, and asks the question “What makes the difference between sociatal life and death?”. The author extrapolates 6 variables from past societies that, he argues, can be used to predict our own fortunes.

Most of the content is, it has to be said, disturbing. But Diamond insists that the jury is still out in our own case. He offers, as an appendix, a common sense list of things that every single one of us can do to play our part in addressing current problems that could lead, if unchecked, to the demise of our society as we know it.

I’m really glad that I read this book, and it’s one of the few books that I will undoubtedly re-read.

[Note that this blog entry was published through an exciting new (still in beta) service called Louder Voice - well worth checking out.]

LouderVoice Tags: , australia, china, environment

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Cool place to stay in Chengdu, Sichuan.

Somebody needs to explain to me how travel worked before the internet. Actually I'm well old enough to recall, but I've blocked those memories for my own protection.

Thanks to a brief perusal of TravelPod I came across Sim's Cozy Guesthouse in Chengdu. I wasn't planning to decide on places to stay this far in advance, but I'll make an exception in this case. Instead of staying in a standard big faceless hotel (we'll be seeing enough of those in Beijing and Shanghai I suspect - and to be honest we'll probably be damn glad of the familiarity of those places when we're awash in a sea of culture shock and jet lag) we'll be staying in an altogether friendlier setting. The pictures of the family room look great, and the price (€20 per night for that family room) is superb. These guys have a travel agency as well, and were able to give me advice (and prices) about how to travel to see the Panda breeding zoo near Chengdu, as well as the giant Buddha of Leshan. They'll also be able to set us on our way to the Yangtze river (we'll probably get the hydrofoil to Yichang and the train onwards to Shanghai).

I've already swapped a few emails with these guys and they seem friendly and on the ball. I'm feeling very much vindicated in the decision to go that little bit further West.

Stinger Season

What a difference an email can make. I heard from our friend Ludi in Sydney, who pointed out that the period we had planned for the East Coast (North of Brisbane) is

1. the wet season, meaning humid as hell (is hell humid? There's one for the theologians amongst you. Would it put out the fires or make their heat even worse. I don't mind heat as long as it's dry...)
   
2. the stinger season. A stinger is something that lives in the water near the coast. It got its name on account of its tendency to sting people. Oh yeah - their sting kills.

So Melbourne is looking really good right now! And we have some friends there too that we haven't seen in many's the year.

We'll still make it to Brisbane (sorry Simon, we're still coming) but we'll leave it till the last four weeks of our time in Oz as opposed to the middle four.

So now things are looking like this:

4 weeks Sydney (based in one address but day tripping).
4 weeks on the road, in three stages:

1. from Sydney to Melbourne (via the Australian Alps where my Aussie mate Mike here in Cork tells me there are ski stations that specialize in Summer walks - sounds really great).
2. Melbourne back to Sydney via the Coast Road (stopping off in places such as Wilson's Promontory which hopefully won't be completely overrun) and
3. Sydney to Brisbane (I have no idea what we're going to see on this stage.

We're really happy with this plan. The choice of where to go in such a vast place has always been a difficult one, but this feels right.

Getting a visa for China from Ireland

This page on the Chinese Embassy in Dublin explains that one has to apply in person in the Dublin office, or send somebody else. In other words, the postal system here is considered so undependable by the Chinese authorities that they're not going to risk using it!

Holiday visas last for 3 months from time of issue. This means that in order to get the visa for myself, my wife and the two kids, we're going to have to head up to Dublin within two months of departing Ireland. What a pain in the ass!