During the night the temperature had dropped to 37°F but Green slept well in the down sleeping bag we had provided for her, spread on top of two thick Cascade Design Therm-A-Rest sleeping pads. Morning dawned; another beautiful day, perhaps our last in China. Knowing the bureaucratic paperwork that waited for us at the border, it […]

As previously mentioned, we had been advised that shipping our truck from China back to United States was not a good idea. The truck could be held in a Customs’ storage lot for possibly a month or more, sitting in the salt air and open to vandalism and theft. Our plan now was to drive […]

So, it was a long way to drive for dinner, like about twenty thousand miles from Portugal, or even longer from California or Belgium where our expedition truck rolled off the ship into Europe. After all that driving we could not leave Beijing without enjoying the famous Peking Duck, a dish as iconic to Beijing as […]

Much of the historic areas of this 3,000-year old city have been destroyed to build modern condos and apartments that are often financially impossible for the average citizen. Green, our guide, described the older apartment she and her mother live in. Maybe it had running water and maybe electricity most of the time. It was […]

Moving on, we passed through the Tiananmen Gate to reach the Forbidden City. There are five massive doors to the gate and seven bridges spanning moats or streams. It was from this Gate on October 1, 1949 that Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic China. The dominating portrait of Mao is a must photo background opportunity […]

B E I J I N G! Over twenty-one million people, plus or minus a few thousand tourists. We had completed our second goal of driving from the Atlantic to the Pacific, wheels on the ground, and now our first goal to follow the Silk Road and on to its final end in Beijing. Formerly […]

We had seen the Great Wall of China twice now, and our China “bucket list” was getting short. We headed east toward the fog-draped Pacific Ocean and its polluted Bay of Bo Hai, where Tanggu, the nearest port to Beijing is located. Green, our trusted guide and constant companion, had no idea of how to […]

We had seen the Western Terminus of the Great Wall of China back on our China Blog # 8, but being one of the main tourist attractions in the country, we wanted to see more of it. Hey, we drove all this way, why not? We had seen the photos of the hordes of tourists […]

So, if you were driving into London to see the fabulous Saint Paul’s Cathedral, you might be shocked to realize that it had been completely carved out of a sandstone cliff. Well, welcome to China and Buddhism. As we walked toward the entrance of the Yungang Grottoes, an ancient Chinese Buddhist temple near the city of Datong, […]

After a wonderful quiet night in our “private” parking lot, we walked up to the entrance of the Hunyan Hanging Monastery. We had seen many religious sites as we traveled across Europe and Central Asia, but never one hanging from a cliff. It was amazing to see Hunyan hanging 246 ft, (75-metre), above the ground. The […]