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Here’s somewhere I’ve wanted to go ever since I moved to this part of northwest London but never had the chance, Harmondsworth Barn. It’s a medieval great barn. One of the few places of that vintage in these parts, although it’s been upgraded and restored a lot over the years. I originally heard about it […]

Last Friday was entirely too sunny to spend in the office so I took an impromptu day off and went hiking in Chiltern Hills near home. Originally I thought I’d get as far as Dunstable or Luton but that wasn’t going to happen so instead I stopped at Tring. The one interesting bit happened right […]

A few weekends ago I tried a second time to do a full circumnavigation of High Wycombe, having not quite achieved it back in 2015. Success would be going in a big circle without cutting through any built-up area. But the weather was a bit miserable and I discovered the bit I cut out last […]

Just one more China post! The evening before I flew home I finally managed to take a half-decent photo of the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai. It’s much more interesting to visit the Pudong area at night instead of in the day. A lot of buildings have cool light shows, but not as impressive or […]

Anchang 安昌 is a delightful little water town just north of Shaoxing. I went there on a sunny Saturday and it was quite busy, but not crammed. You can get there easily from Shaoxing by taking the regular public bus number 118. It takes around one hour. The town is very similar to Tongli which […]

And now as Michael Bolton might say, back to the good part. You might, wrongly, think this was part of my previous Chinese adventuring but actually I came back to the UK for a month and then work asked me to go back to Suzhou again for another week. So I dutifully did and after […]

So after I had a fun day out in Xingping I decided to go back there the next day and see how far I could get along the river. If you look around on the internet there’s various references to a classic hike from there to another village called Yangdi along the most scenic section […]

XingPing （兴坪） is the place I should have stayed instead of YangShuo. It’s only 45 minutes away by bus, but it feels like a totally different place. Much quieter and less commercialised. The town is right on the most scenic section of the Li river. In fact, the scene on the back of the 20元 […]

So Yangshuo is a town in the countryside just south of Guilin which was probably really nice 20 years ago but which has been commercialised so much it’s easily the tackiest place I’ve been in China. Think hordes or persistent touts that target white tourists, loads of Western junk food, “Irish” pubs, etc. etc. Not […]

Where to next on my off-season travellings?! Well I went south and west to Guangxi, and its capital Guilin. It’s mainly famous for the strange rock formations dotted around the city, but there’s actually much better examples in countryside to the south around Yangshuo. The one below is supposed to resemble an elephants trunk, although […]