When the easiest part of your day is waking up in the morning, you know it was a fairly rough day. That’s exactly what we confronted when we tried to take a daytrip from Xian to the nearby Huashan Mountains. Buckle up for a ride. [Editor’s note: technically, “Hua Shan” Read more…
I’ve wanted to visit Mongolia for a long time now, with a vision of riding horses across the grasslands in my mind. However, I figured that wouldn’t be possible on this trip since we weren’t planning to spend much time in the far northern latitudes and it seemed really hard Read more…
After spending a week in the sprawling metropolis of Beijing, we decided we needed to briefly decamp to a quainter, rustic location in China for our next series of adventures. This led us to the “tiny” town (read: population of ~3.5 million) of Datong, which is situated approximately 6.5 Read more…
We somehow managed to survive our first week in China, all of which was spent in Beijing. In some respects it was exactly as difficult as we expected it would be, but in others it was way more difficult. Amidst the struggles and triumphs of our first week, we developed Read more…
When we first thought about visiting China, I didn’t know much about the region, but I did know two things I wanted to be sure to see: the Great Wall, and pandas. The pandas will come in a few weeks, when we get down to Chengdu further south, but the Read more…
We’re about to depart from Beijing after a week in this glorious(?) city, and we’ve certainly managed to keep ourselves busy while here. More extensive blog posts on some of our experiences will follow in the coming days (thanks to our impending 6 hour train ride!), but we wanted to Read more…
There are many things that shocked us about Beijing the first few days we were here. One of them, which has had a trickle-down effect on all of our actions within the city, has been its epic, sprawling layout. It’s easy to look at a map, see that something is Read more…
I’m sipping my latte completely alone in the hostel café because I’m the only one awake at this hour. Unsurprising given that we fell asleep hard around 8pm last night. It seems despite my efforts to counteract jet lag by adjusting my sleep schedule for the few days prior to Read more…
In a couple hours our flight will take off from Seattle to Beijing and our true backpacking will begin. It’s actually happening and “surreal” doesn’t begin to adequately describe it. Jess set up this fabulous blog (with no help from me, unsurprisingly) and launched this ship with her inaugural post, Read more…
Welcome to Our Jaunt Abroad! Oh man, down to the wire. As I sit here and write this first post, it’s late the night before we take off for China, and it’s starting to sink in that we’re really leaving for the trip. I’m trying to stay up late in Read more…