I went to Nandos last night, had there peri peri mixed nuts, so good, then my normal cheese and chicken burger with spicy chips. I'm a creature of habit, i like Nandos, Primark and Vodka. So I went to the super market and bought macadamia, brazil, peanuts, almonds and cashews, then I got some peri peri pepper spice, mixed it all with oregano, onion and garlic powder, and some salt and paprika...it tasted a bit garlicky and not as good but i think its close.

Peggle had become my latest obsession, I can clear all the peggles in a game and the other day I saw from work a peggle taxi go by all colorful, made me happy.

As for the other pictures, I don't know. boredom, heat, i also feel alittle sick from the peri peri nuts I made. I thought id be working tomorrow but i guess I'm not, I don't have anything to do, and I think my photoshoot on saturday isn't happening...so much wasted time. Ironic thing is my sisters days off are Monday and Tuesday when I will be working so I can even see her.

Might watch the host tonight.

8-6-09 Monday
On the move again…
I’m on a nine hour to light to Beijing in my sweat pants keeping comfy reading a crap book. Why it all my stuff always has cat hair on it.
Yesterday mom and I walked in the valley around the Isle of Wight while I took inferred photographs.
I have a giant bruise down my arm

9-6-09 Tuesday
Our flight got us in around 9am Beijing time; by the time we had flown early evening on the 9-hour flight we had completely missed our night-time and any sleep. Leaving the airport with the quarantine officer checking our plain before getting off and 3 pigs flu checks followed. One person was not allowed off the plane because his temperature reading must have been too high. After sorting 9 hours worth of uncomfortable underpants, we got transferee to our hotel in Beijing, it was about midday before we got to bed and slept until 4pm, after that we went exploring. There were so many Peking dogs everywhere and bicycles, our hotel is surrounded by shanty towns it’s amazing, there are markets of fruit and fish everywhere, there are no other English people around and everyone stares. We went to a pearl market and I bought a necklace, she made in front of me for £6, I could have haggled and the pearl isn’t real because I can tell by feel. In the evening we were brave enough to go to a restaurant, got our meal with a lot of pointing and had a huge meal that came to £7 and we asked for the bill and said thank you in Chinese. Tomorrow I want to be brave enough to take a lot of photos.

10-6-09 Wednesday
Everywhere I went today people stopped and stared, they pointed and waved and smiled, a few time people took photos of me or asked to have a photo with me, I felt like a celebrity. We visited three different temples and Talaman square, the second temple was my favourite it was a very old style Buddhist temple. Our tour guild tried to sell us tickets to go to a Chinese opera, we didn’t want to tell the truth that I’m fairly sure no English person wants to hear Chinese singing, it is truly awful.

11-6-09 Thursday
It’s 6:50am china time, we are off from Beijing in to the great wall still in the Hebei province and after 3 nights in a row of literally no sleep because my body decided despite being so tired I could sleep standing; its still not going to let me sleep at night because that’s UK day time! Also our cab driver pronounced my name ‘Snozlay’ I’m not sure how he got that from Brown?
The drivers are nuts, its not dis-similar of how id expect India to be. They drive through red lights, wrong side of the road and are forever honking each other. We were in hysterics in the car to the great wall because our driver was driving down the wrong side of the road being honked at by someone behind him trying to overtake in the opposite side of the roads, hard shoulder, its insane. Yesterday when we went to the temples, our guild explained to use, they light incense and pray top Buddha, not because they are Buddhist (because Buddhist are vegetarian and Chinese are definitely not but because they Chinese will pray to whoever they think will give them what they want, regardless of religion, which I was thought was quite funny. There was also a man asleep on the back of a van, leaning on boxes, it was quite funny seeing how they drive and how anyone could just sleep on the back on a pick up like that. During that morning I saw a group of bicycles all going to market carrying huge amounts of garlic on a plaited stalk.
We hiked up the other great wall and walked part of it, then also hiked through the valleys surrounding it, it was very beautiful, we had Sherpa’s thought-out the way, and a driver who gave us fruit and water before and after. I feel good for having done it; there were hoards of goats everywhere trying to get up the trees and in the rovers, as well as huge white ducks.

During the evening we walked through the shanty town markets by ourselves, I was walking ahead taking photographs when I heard my mom yelp, I had noticed I was walking under a telephone wire with a lot of doves on and assuming by the way she was touching her hair one had pooped on her, until she told me, it had laid an eye in the air and hit her on the way down.

12-6-09 Friday
Chengdu:
Ever since I was twelve I have adored Asian culture, it’s very off actually going there and have people nudge each other and point at me, taking photos of me with there phones. Weird but pleasant, I can be the mysterious foreigner I always wanted to be. I don’t feel congested for the first tie in 5 days and I'm hoping that I can relax enough to sleep now. Chengdu is so perfect, I have never been in a hotel like this, everything is traditional Chinese from the street floor to bamboo to buildings, with lanterns everywhere, and the whole street is like this. I have found a panda shop down the street, Chengdu is famous for its panda research centre and they are very proud of it. Unlike Beijing it’s not an assault on the senses with people trying to get money out of you. This city is hotter and dry, I have seen a lot of Tibetan Buddhist monks, as there is a temple next-door, one on a Rickshaw who bowed his head and smiled as he went past us. I can hear birds everywhere outside the mesh shutters; our room looks onto a courtyard with trees and tea tables, the hotel is the most beautiful I have ever been in, everything about it is so china.

Tomorrow we will be seeing the pandas, something I have not done since I was seven, I cried, I wonder if I will tomorrow? We have a fantastic walk-in wet room; I showered earlier and am relaxing in the heat in my towel on a flower pattern bed. I hadn’t showed much since I got to china, despite the heat we have not had much time at the hotels and my hair has not gotten greasy although I burnt myself yesterday walking the great wall.

My mother is just taking a shower now to get the remainder of the egg out of her hair, which had me in hysteretic. The last day of Chengdu, Eva out guild will be taking us to the countryside to see the traditional markets and old buildings. She is from Tibet and is only nineteen, she moved to India by herself at sixteen to learn English and now works in Chengdu.

13-6-07 Saturday
Today is humid, the air is sticky and damp and the sky overcast and misty. For lunch we went to the back packers hostel up the road, its down this smell alley but the food is cheap and they have Internet access. There is a random chicken wondering around outside, mom has some jasmine tea. Tomorrow we are moving on again, no sooner than we got here.

This morning we went to the panda centre, I loved it, its not expensive at all, and they have something called a panda card which gives you annual membership to places like here and the temples. I discovered that Pandas like to scratch bum on trees a lot, they also like to sleep up very high which is weird considering there size, the babies are very mischievous and Red pandas are like racoon/cat/panda/dog/fox/lemurs, all fluffy and fat. I also saw a baby panda scratching its belly with its foot, which was so sweet. Before we left a huge group of Japanese’s tourists decided they all wanted their photos with us, which almost made us late for the bus home. Here in Chengdu they have a panda festival once a year I so wish I had been there for it.

Beijing is at the top of china below Mongolia, the great wall was used to keep the Mongolians out, now they parade the wall annoying tourists. The forest and mountain almost European like, as someone we were traveling with said ‘you could be anywhere, Spain, Australia’s?’ the trees are all deciduous.
However when we flew to Chengdu we discovered it to be much more subtropics, a lot of bamboo, papyrus, and banana plants. Chengdu is part of the Sichuan province south best and boarders Tibet, so there are a lot of Tibetans and Tibet monks here as well as temples.

They are very proud of the giant panda, it is a symbol of everything from cigarettes to buses and they have a panda festival, I plan to buy panda ear style hair band later and chopsticks. When looking at the map I discovered Wo-long panda centre is also in Chengdu-not far from the city. I noticed that this must be the region for the wild ones as well as there are of snowy mountains and bamboo forests surrounding the city, as I know they do not inhabit the whole of china. The more I travel the more I want to know about china’s intricate history.
Later we wondered the city, it took many photos, there are monks everywhere and I really wanted to get a good shot of them, I wanted to when I saw some sitting at a temple we visited in Beijing as well but Fifi our guild wouldn’t let us. She also wouldn’t let me take a photo of an old man with the old deep blue Chinese uniform and beard. I didn’t like her. We passed men on bikes selling fruit from their kart and went to the supermarket. There were some I’ve animals, toads, catfish, terrapins but it made me feel sad to see them so cruelly treated, if your going to kill to eat do it but don’t cram them into tiny tanks making them suffer. I bought Phillip some jasmine tea there, at least I hope it’s that and not potpourri. I continued down the road and found a tiny little grey kitten the scruffiest thing I’ve seen, the shop owner have him some milk and food, which he ate. I walked a few more steps and a sweet little hairy puppy plodded towards me, surprisingly clean and very cute! He was happy to have his photo taken then lick my shoes. So I have a bit of a stroke before he plodded back into his shop. For awhile we sat by a statue near our hotel and sure enough someone came up for a photo with me, once one had all of a sudden everyone did and before long I had a crowd around me of people taking photos and wanting photos- it has truly been the most bizarre experience, I will feel like such a norm back home.
I bought some panda chopstick set and panda ears at Chengdu panda store by my hotel- the girls wore cute black and white dresses and shoes with a paw print apron and ears in a way that only an oriental girl can, like a manga character.
Since we got here it has taken us until Chengdu to feel regular again, when we got here we only had 4 meals in the first 5 days, I didn’t shower or use the bathroom of sleep, we climbed the great wall with no breakfast or lunch after. It feels good to feel normal again.
In the evening we went for a Sichuan hot pot, their foods is traditionally very spicy, it is an interesting meal because your table has a large pot embedded into it with a lot of chilli seeds and spices in, you then choose various meats, mushrooms, tofu, bamboo (which tastes like savoury melon) etc and they bring plates and dump it all in the pot and you cook to taste. Why the restaurants and bars always have to sit us next to the window I don’t know, during our meal a group of children decided to start taking photos of us on their parents phone cameras and didn’t stop for 25 minutes.

There is a lot of Poverty in Chengdu, the monks help anyway they can, we saw a homeless woman feeding her daughter with cerebral palsy, rice on the street and they gave them some money. It is very sad. I also saw a blind man playing an instrument on the street, he looked so beautiful but couldn’t take a photo it felt like I was taking advantage, and so I gave him some money.

14-6-09 Sunday
Our tour guild took us to the Sichuan province countryside in a small van to see how other people lived; it was a very interesting experience. We drove through the pothole roads and lotus plant fields towards the country market. Everyone beeps none stop, and you could see pig farmer with the biggest pigs I’ve ever seen. Our guild told us about Chinese weddings, and how it’s a none religious ceremony, if you want to get married you simply write to the government to declare it and then you are, most then have a party to celebrate and that is it. I took a lot of photographs at the market, they probably speak better about the way the Chinese treat animals than I can ever explain, and I’m a fairly tuff person on the subject, I can watch hunts in the UK as I did for my editorial project but even this made me feel truly ill, and its true what I heard, they really will eat anything with legs except the dining table.

After we went for a meal at the house of a family who lived near by, the Chinese do not keep there houses very clean our guild told us, but the meal was the best we’d had the whole trip. Although I was reluctant to drink water I hadn’t been covered for hepatitis but mom had so she was ok.

I am now sitting in an old van over a bumpy road with my hair blowing in my face- the air is damp and cool today, the rice paddies are misty with butterfly all around them, surrounding that is bamboo forests. This is the area of the big earth quake you will have heard all over the news awhile back, a lot of peoples houses are still very damaged or being re built. It is such a poor country and everyone wants your money I feel its hard to draw the line between giving to those who need it compare to those who are trying to scam you and rip you off. I can understand how my neighbour wants to stay here and teach; there is definitely something about this place. I feel like I have really travelled properly, not just hotels and tourists and was something I never thought I could do properly.

15-6-09 Monday
Last night we were dropped off in the middle of the night; we didn’t even know we were in the mountains because the roads wee flat until the car headlights hit the side of a huge mountain and then we realised we were 1000 metres above sea level and surrounded with mountains. Guilian within the Guangxi province is just like Vietnam, the rivers, the mountains, the subtropics damp weather, the plantation, it is exactly how you would expect Vietnam to be, which makes sense since the two boarder each other. The airport was like Chinese Vegas, and while we flew to Guilian, there was pink lightning all around the plane, this made my mom very uneasy as when she first travelled to Hong Kong her plane went through a lightning storm and was stuck, everyone on the plane thought they were going to die and she’s been scared of flying since. We learnt when we got there that there is thunder and lighting everyday because of the humidity.
The hotel is rustic, Mosquito nets and Wet room bathrooms where you cannot flush toilet roll, there is a pig farm behind us and has tropical rain everyday. The food is amazing value, so far no meal we have had including drinks and alcohol has come to over £7.

Just when you think you’ve done it all they take you cycling through misty grasslands and bamboo rafting through the mountains. You can see large bat caves, birds of paradise and dragonflies, the crickets are deafening. During both the bamboo rafting and cycling we were bothered by the woman who try to sell you things, they run after you on your bikes, cycle beside you and come up next to you on their own rafts, trying to sell any crap they can. They talk at you in Chinese yelling hello between every few words and shaking things in your face, everywhere so far we have been in china has them, they drive me nuts!
We cycled to the moon hill mountain, which has a crescent moon shape hole at the top. Mom stayed at the bottom but I did the hike to the top, it was surrounded in bamboo forests I looked but to my disappointment couldn’t find any bamboo snakes. Once at the top we could walk under the crescent shape in the mountain, large water drips came down and swallows that nested in the crevices flew around and danced with each other in the air. The path was slippery with mud and water on the way down. After we cycled around 5-6 miles back through the mountains to our hotel there were a lot of buffalo I know have bruised inner thighs.

16-6-09 Tuesday
Tonight I wrote home after the came after a full day power cut, I have noticed how china blocks my emails so no one back home can get them, it also wont allow me into most websites. I could hear a good 10 different sounds from frog’s bats cricket’s locusts as well as glow bugs and many large bugs and spiders

17-6-09 Wednesday
This morning we awoke to a lot of rain, the frogs are all calling each other this morning in the rice fields which are full of water, I read in the hotel you can go swimming inside the Moon Caves around the mountains. Today we are leaving, getting a sleeper train to Guangdong province that boarders Hong Kong, after that we pass through customs, people think Hong Kong is part of china but not in their eyes, once we go there our visa get stamped and were considered gone. I’m covered in mosquito’s bites, its horrible. Our last evening here there was the most beautiful sunset over mountains, right before our taxi driver picked us up. However our taxi driver was completely insane, the drive to the train station was about an hour and half and during that time there are toll areas, instead of stopping to pay, she sped up and went straight through the barrier, knocked it clean off and it hit our roof as she accelerated out leaving a lot of people standing there looking at her. Once we got to the train station she stood there waiting for a tip, but after that funny as it was we weren’t going to tip. Everyone here wants a tip just for doing their job, regardless of whether they did a good job or not. Trying to get into the train station was a nightmare as my suit case wheels and handle all broke off and my suit case when flying down some stairs, which I had to go retrieve it. The sleeper train was quite nice, I got a decent nights sleep for a change, the only thing not nice was the toilets, but that didn’t surprise since everywhere I had been including MacDonald’s and the airport the toilets consisted on a hole in the floor which you squat over, which was something out of my worst night mare, so I never used one.

18-6-09 Thursday
Hong Kong
The hotel was lovely, a giant dinner plate shower which I love and needed after the trip on the sleeper train, except the bathroom and bedroom had mirrors everywhere, which seemed cool at first until you realised between the mirrors and glass walls of the bathroom it was very difficult to get any privacy.

When we got outside I wore something to over the mess on my legs of bites, they were all swollen and lumpy. The air was chokingly hot and smoggy like your head was in a bag. I found Hong Kong fascinating it’s definitely somewhere I could see myself living and something to consider for the future. My mom said she was going to move there and I would have been born there which is odd to think. All the major buildings have bamboo scaffolding, you wouldn’t think it holds as well as metal but it does, the women seem to do everything especially heavy lifting and everyone speaks English here. So many people wear the masks to protect them from us infectious foreigners haha.

19-6-09 Friday & Saturday
Over the 2 and half days here we explored everything, the hotels and news warned of a typhoon coming tomorrow, they put a big chart of the weather movement in the hotel reception lucky we would just miss it. We found a market and haggled for bags and dresses, I bought a dress for £7 and two bags for £9 each, which originally cost £40 each. The MacDonald’s sold happy meals with Cinnamoroll toys in which is my favourite hello kitty character after tare panda! And we went to a Japanese Sushi bar and watched the sushi prepared in front of us, fresh salmon sliced and placed on top of hot rice, it was the nicest sushi I’ve ever had.

20-6-09
Left Hong Kong at 11.30pm

Camera; Nikon D200
Lens; Nikkor 18mm-135mm
Filter; Hoya R72