After two months of fast paced moving going from place to place every couple of days I think we've finally found our perfect speed and yesterday signed a lease on a flat in Hoi An which will be our new house for the next 20 days. Hurrah! I'm not really sure what made us decide to take root here. It was all quite random. We were just looking for a new hotel for a couple more nights and happened to notice a a small sign for a house to rent. More out of curiosity we went to have a look around one. Well I say curiosity I mean I was feeling nosey and wanted to look round a Vietnamese house (is that bad?). Although we'd just gone in for fun we realised actually it wasn't such a bad idea. Within a couple of hours we'd decided to stay longer and found a place to live. During the time between finding the place and deciding to stay we had an encounter with an interesting chap who runs a vegetarian restaurant called Karma Waters. We'd gone to talk to him about snorkling courses he runs, and if the weather would be good ...

Hanoi is hectic! The pace of life there is far too crazy. There's a constant stream of bikes zooming around every corner loudly tooting their horns on average every three seconds, or less. And the streets are packed full of little shops each with their owner trying to entice you in to buy something. If you walk down the street a Xe Om (motor bike taxi) will ask if you want a ride. If you stand still a cyclo will will hunt you down and insist that you must want a tour. As if that wasn't enough if you sit down anywhere for a 'quiet' drink, guaranteed within 5 seconds someone will come and ask you to buy a book/hat/banana or any number of other things. Despite all this we really liked it. We had a lot of fun there. In fact maybe too much fun. In true "if you can't beat 'em join 'em" style we hopped on the back of a scooter and zoomed over to "Beer Corner" (a crossroads with small bars on each corner, marked C on this map) where Bia Hoi the local brew is sold for only 3000d (12p) a pint. It was a respectable start, ...

Whilst walking around Beijing I had the first "What am I doing?!" thought. Wandering aimlessly around the streets I suddenly realised I was at the other side of the world seeing things all around me I had never seen before. It was a great sensation. Kind of floating around in the world like a dream. Beijing is amazing, we were there for 7 days, the longest we'd stayed anywhere so far, but even that was no where near enough. You could stay for months and only really scratch the surface. It's kind of hard to really appreciate what's going on in a place like that. We were staying in a hostel in the Hutong. At the moment a lot of these are in the process of being torn down as some are really quite run down and the drive for modernisation is meaning some people don't want these ancient dwellings anymore. Others (including Prince Charles!) are trying to save them. I hope this is successful. They really do have a lot of character, it would be a real shame if they all went. You can happily stroll around for hours. Each street has it's own little buzz about, small shops, restaurants, ...

So as promised, here are "a few" photos from the rest of the stay in Harbin. Mainly from the market, which was amazing. Deffo recommend popping in there for a stroll if you happen to be passing... erm. Here's a map to find it if you do fancy checking it out. Planning on updating this with other restaurants/interesting food places as we go around, so keep an eye out. Also there are pics from the ice festival, which wasn't quite what we expected. It seems from this year it has been taken over by Disney. You can imagine our joy when we were greeted by a huge Mickey Mouse, lots of merchandise and general selling out of a previously independent event. Booo. Still, we had a good time. Well actually it got 3.5 out of 10, but you know we had as good a time as we could at -23 surrounded by plastic Disney characters when we were expecting world famous ice sculptures. I have to start the post off with this though: It is the breakfast from the hotel we were staying at, The Lungmen, which was just opposite the station. Have you ever seen anything like it?! There was a ...

I had drafted a post about how all the travelling was, in a subtle but effecting way, a lot more tiring than I was expecting. I'm sure anyone who's been away for a long time will know what I mean - never being quite sure what will happen in any given situation, being unable to communicate even very simple ideas to people blah blah blah. However since arriving in China we have been met by such a friendly reception all seems twinkly and nice so the post seemed completely inappropriate for now. As a bonus now we have moved a little further south it has warmed up somewhat too. It is now -1. Feels like t-shirt weather! So anyhow the depressing post has gone in the bin for now and instead here's an update on our shiny happy trip from last week, the end of Russia and the beginning of China. Our last stop in Russia was a couple of days in Irkutsk, including a day trip to Listvianka on Lake Baikal. The lake was amazingly beautiful. It is the largest fresh water lake in the world at around 400 miles in length, so looking across the lake was more ...