8 new countries visited- 10 including HK and Macao
6 capitals visited
2 continents
14 plane flights
Shanghai biggest city visited
Luang Namtha smallest “city” visited
17 Chinese cities visited- including HK and M
30 cities visited overall, and 1 village and 1 ger camp
1 DMZ
1 Chinese police station
17 train rides- 6 overnight, 1 over 2 nights and 1 over 3 nights…
8 long distance coach rides- 1 overnight
1 electric bike ride
1 near death experience
Plane, coach, bus, minibus, ferry, electric bike, pedal bike, horse, cable car, elephant, car, taxi, metro, train and foot all travelled on
72 hours longest train ride
7 minutes shortest train ride- Maglev at 430kmh
-35C lowest temperature in Harbin
+38C highest temperature in Shanghai
3000m highest altitude
4 dead Communist Mausoleums visited
1 language learnt (sort of)
2 new alphabets learnt
Lots of new friends
5 different currencies in wallet
170 Blog Posts
How do I feel the night before I return to a country I left, and rather relievedly if I’m honest, so many months ago? Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’m tired of moving, of not knowing where things are, of not communicating effortlessly and am looking forward to English fields, my cat and cheese. I want to get back to Edinburgh for university and the library. I long for familiarity. But, again unsurprisingly, I am sad to have left all my Qingdao friends as well as the city and country itself. It offered so many adventures in its commonplace. I’ve enjoyed doing so much travelling, treading so many streets. Being the exotic foreigner, the immigrant. In the UK I’m just another student clutching a textbook and my carefully collected £25,000 worth of debt. But, for now-and probably a very brief now, that’s actually what I can’t wait to get back to.
As for the moral at the end of my story, there’s not much. Except that I think that when travelling, one doesn’t really visit different countries. Rather it is basically the same one but in different periods of history according to their development. I feel like I have seen the 1950s, the 1990s and the 2020s rather than North Korea, SE Asia and (parts of) China.
Oo I did learn something- Vietnamese motorcycles always stop, there’s always room on a Chinese bus, only Westerners can cook Western food, queuing is for the weak, and someone, somewhere, always speaks English. And Earl Grey tea in Chinese is 伯爵红茶…
As for this particular blog, it ends where my journey does, in St Petersburg. This is the last post.
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