Grey Bricks of Beijing

Rail The plan for China was to catch an overnight sleeper train between cities. Not only would this save us the cost of accommodation but it would also be cheaper than flights. For our very first train journey; Shanghai to Beijing I decided to book us a private cabin trading all the cost savings to …

Shanghai and old water town

The day before we were set to arrive in Shanghai, Suti realised the accommodation we'd booked for the duration of our stay was actually a 2 hour bus ride outside of the city center. It's easy to look at a map and think everything looks so close, when in reality everything in China is so …

3 days in Osaka

It's a short 30 minute train ride from Kyoto to Osaka. You can catch the Shinkansen which shortens it to 15 minutes for an extra $100. (but why would you?)  We only had 3 days in Osaka before flying to Shanghai, so we tried to squeeze in as much as we could. Osaka was a …

A Sea of Tourists

Storm Mountain We had originally only planned to spend a weekend in Kyoto however leaving the chicken farm early meant we now had an extra week to kill. As we had not budgeted for this extra week we decided to get ourselves a cheap Airbnb in the outskirts of Kyoto and live thriftily for a …