venusintransit

I'll eep this brief. On sunday I was out in the sun without sunscreen. Sunday evening I was bright pink. Yesterday I hurt.Last night I started suffering from unbearablle itching. Today this continued. I went to the pharmacist and boughtmany bottles of stuff including spray on tea/aloe vera stuff, spray on antiseptic/anaesthetic stuff and a few other things. Its kind of messed up part of my holiday and it is due to my own stupidity. So in future I must remember:even if only going out for a short time in the sun put on sunscreen - just trying to pay attention to how cooked you are feeling does not work.

My main hope now is that I am not going to be this uncomfortable on the flight home. As it is the various sprays seem to be helping a lot.

Just thought I'd share my woes. :(

So I am now in Australia, Sydney to be precise. I could be more precise I guess but I don't think its important. :)

As you can see I've not had time to do much updating recently. I have a half written post taking me to the end of china but the problem with traveling in company is that sitting down on my own to write stuff up isn't happening so much...

( So another summary post )

The two key points of this post are in the subject really. I'm now in Cambodia (Phnom Penh) in a nice hotel after a brief delay at the border when our bus apparently broke and we had to wait for a replacement. Got here fine in the end though and a nice tuk tuk ride got us straight to the hotel.

The injured bit isn't as bad as it could be though. Walking from hotel to bus at 6 this morning I managed to mis-step or something and basically my weight came down on my ankle wrong. I'm never sure of technical terms and if this is twisted, sprained or something else but basically there is a bit of swelling and lack of mobility in my foot and a certain amount of hobbling. I'm very lucky to have Nurse Hannah here looking after me. She's strapped up my ankle when we went out, made ice in the fridge and it is currently freezing my ankle. This is all good.

I'm hoping its not going to cause any major problems... Tomorrow should be a trip to the Killing Fields which should be interesting but I think horrifyingly traumatic. Then in the afternoon the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda. Then day after that its Siem Reap (6 hour bus trip there) and then that afternoon and a further 2 days to look around Angkor Wat. Then Bankgkok and on to Australia.

Hopefully I'll be alright tomorrow to look around stuff here tomorrow and if I do get further issues then there is penty of time for Angkor Wat temples and rest if needed...

I feel like a right clown though for managing to screw my ankle up walking down the street. Still, I think I'm glad its now rather than a month ago when I was on my own...

Things are still going on here... I'm in Saigon/Ho Chi Min city right now having flown in from hoi an yesterday. I'm finding it hard to find time right now to update. Travelling with company means I no longer have lots of spare hours or minutes to keep you all uptodate since I just get to be more sociable now. At this rate I think you are still going to be reading my travel updates months after I get back...

( So one of my summary posts... )

So think back to the 25th July... What were you doing? That's a rhetorical question, unless it was more interesting than a trip to Wuhou Ci and a very spicy hotpot then I'm not that interested. :)

( Wuhou Ci, the hotpot as well as a day of nothing and a really big buddha )

I'm now in vietnam having flown here yesterday. Very nice hotel rrom which is cool. Unfortunately the weather is swapping between very sunny and far too hot and heavy heavy rain. Rain being the current problem for whie we are going for a walk.

Tonight we are off to the water puppet theatre, tomorrow a day trip to the Perfume Pagoda and day after that we go to halong bay for two days and a night. Vietnam is very different which worried me for a while but I'm getting used to it.

Anyway, that's it for now, hopefully more detailed catch up posts at some other point...

So this has been a long time coming... With company it s a lot harder to find the time to write up lots of stuff... But here's a writeup that was started over a week ago and concerns some of Chengdu, in particular pandas, a monastery, Sichuan opera and a drinking session...

( A good day in Chengdu... )

We had a typhoon warning here last night. Up to the lock yourself in your house and don't come out til the all clear is given... it was all clear this morning though so a bit of an anticlimax. It is unfortunately now heading towards vietnam... :-(

More update later hopefully (I keep saying that....) but just thought i'd let people know I'm not dead or anything.

Just another quick post here since I don't have huge amounts of time to write details. I do still want to write up chengdu properly but need to find spare time to do so...

( A summary of the end of Chengdu and a bit of Shanghai )

It occurs to me that I am nearly half way through the travel part of my trip. nine and a half weeks away, two of which are the chill out time in Australia (which will be awesome but not in the same way). I'm currently three and a half weeks into travel which means only four weeks until I get on the flight to australia. Once I've got into the swing of things its all happening very fast....

Maybe on the train to HK I'll write that detailed Chengdu writeup...

So today I woke up feeling rough. I woke up several times in the night feeling like that too. I'm not sure if it was something I ate last night (a bunch of us went for a hot pot) or what it is but I've not left the hostel today and have felt very sorry for myself. The quick summary of the last few days is that I've loved my time in Chengdu.

( Chengdu in summary... )

I've got over the fail since my last post. Thanks to the thoughts from everybody, it did put it a bit in perspective. I now am looking at it as getting to the top of the mountain but with a more unusual technique than many...

( So you want to know about the eclipse then? )

Today has not been a good day. I have learned many things though including:

1) Mountains are big
2) Don't trust the hostel workers to know about things
3) Carrying people up mountains looks like really hard work
4) Carrying people up mountains earns a good wage
5) Mountains are actually quite dull.

( A bad day on a mountainside )

Editor's note: This post was originally written on Saturday evening. It is not up to date on where I am now or even where I was when I wrote it. I'll hopefully be writing more later, even if its a brief filler....

( A day in Xian - Terracotta warriors mainly )

Having flown to Xian because of busy trains I've now been told by somebody else wanting to get the train from Xian to Chengdu that there are no trains due to floods disrupting the service. I need to find out for sure tomorrow (I think I'll check first thing) but if so it likely means I'll be flying again. I considered either detouring or doing new shit but I quite like my current plan and I hear other trains aren't that much better.

I'm debating where to put a few days oof the trip though. I've been told by a few people who I've been chattign to at the hostel that the yangtze river (three gorges) is a bit shit now. Though it doesn't sound like they had problemswith a chinese only boat which almost certainly didn't help. But it means I am debating whether or not to try for that and if I don't I might put Jiuzhaigou back on the list... I'll worry about that stuff in chengdu though if I get there. :)

So I'm now in sunny Xian. At least I assume its sunny. Its hot certainly. But I haven't seen the sun from the ground for some time now... I'm hoping in Chengdu it was just misty and cloudy though rather than it being as bad as Beijing and shanghai in terms of smoggyness. Though if its going to be smoggy a pea-souper might be fun...

So what's happened since my last entry? Wait... what was my last entry... *Goes to look*.

( Ah,this happened... )

Just a very quick post since despite being only just gone ten I want to get to bed soon...

Yesterday I did a tour of various places and today similar...

( Great wall, Ming Tombs, Tiananmen square and the Summer Palace (and prob other stuff) )

So yesterday was my last day in Shanghai.

( Jump straight in to the excitement )

So this is more of a filler than a detailed write up. I'll hopefully get a chance to fill in detail tomorrow or something but it depends how I feel really. Despite occasional temptation I will put more effort into seeing China than writing about it. :) This does mean you have some disjointed paragraphs of stuff...

( Shopping, walking, gardens, temples and museums )

I'm sorry to report I'm a bit under the weather today and indeed have been for the past few days. I'm not sure why but I'm hoping its just my body adjusting. The heat is feeling not too bad but I am sweating a lot and probably thus losing a lot of liquid and salt. Ive decided to stop drinking water to rehydrate in favour of other drinks with sugars and salt and stuff in (one drink I had yesterday was "lemon flavoured salted soda". It was precisely what it said on the tin.

Yesterday was particularly bad and I spent about an hour feeling totally rough having lost my appetite and the thought of food actually making me feel sick. Fortunately some timein mcdonalds, two large cokes and a portion of nie and salty chips perkedme up a bit. It did trigger off a minor panic attack though. There is part of me saying "Its just adjusting to the heat" and part of me saying "Your body disagrees with this part of the world and will continue to object until you leave in two months". It was that last part that caused me a minor panic attack yesterday and another this morning when my stomach started playing up again.

On the plus side I did get to see yesterday Yuyuan garden, the Bund (though not in detail), Nanjing Lu and Xiniandi. I'll try to talk more about it later. I might take a night in tonight since I'm not feeling great, I'll see how I go later though. I really hope I'm feeling better tomorrow since I'm meant to be getting the overnght sleeper to Beijing then. It would be nice to not be feeling like crap at that point, especially since I'll be fending for myself at that point.

Anyway, that's all for now I'm afraid. I really just wanted a bit of a whinge about feeling crappy. I've been taking Loperamide which I thought had been heping up until this morning. Hopefully if the drugs aren't working it will just go away on its own.