The Friday Photo: Black Dragon Pool
This is Black Dragon Pool, one of the most tranquil places in beautiful Lijiang, China. It was built as a pleasure garden for the feudal...
EscapeArtistes Blog
The Prettiest Town We’ve Ever Visited
Ever heard of Lijiang? It’s an old town in northern Yunnan, in what was once the Dali Kingdom, the fought-over hinterland between China and Tibet....
Learning Mandarin: Week 3
A week to go before we head out of Kunming into the great wide open, over 30 hours of language lessons in, and we are,...
The Friday Photo: Nine Dragon Pond
It’s been sunny lately. So t’other day we went to the park. And the park was a lake. With nine dragons. Now, the Chinese have...
Learning Mandarin: Week 2
So the boy and I have completed our second week learning Mandarin in China. We’ve only got a week’s more learning before we’re out on...
The Friday Photo: Little Fluffy Clouds
Remember that song by The Orb — Little Fluffy Clouds? No? Wayull, this shot from our big road trip to Australia’s Red Centre kind of...
How to Ride a Bus in China
Even after boarding Indonesian ferries, riding rural Cambodian buses and squeezing onto the London Tube during the Christmas Eve shopping frenzy, taking the bus in...
Learning Mandarin: Week 1
Learning from our experiences in Indonesia, I figured it would be wise to start our sojourn in China by actually studying a bit of Mandarin...
The Friday Photo: Heavenly Palace
Yesterday we wandered through the skyscrapers of downtown Kunming to gawp at this ninth-century pagoda, set in a quiet garden where grandmothers take their grandchildren...
Anyone for Chicken Claw?
Wandering around Kunming, our “home” for the past week, I sometimes feel a little like those British journalists inspecting America during the Gilded Age, marvelling...