NanJing [南京]

Nanjing! - a 2 hour train ride from Shanghai (leaves from both Shanghai Train Station上海火车站 and the very new and shiny Hongqiao railway station 上海虹桥火车站 - which is way out west near Hongqiao Airport on the newly opened section of Line 2.

Apart from seeing a bit of Nanjing [南京] we also learnt a valuable lesson: ALWAYS take your passport to stay in a Chinese Hotel (or hostel). They refuse every other form of identification (if you are a chinese citizen you can bring your ID card instead). Also if you had happened to be staying in a different hotel before they could call up to get them to confirm your details, but as we are resident in China that wasn't going to happen. So after sitting in a police station for 2hours to wait to find out that the police have no access to our information registered on the government database. So we had to head home that same day: on the brightside it's free to exchange your train ticket for a different day, just as long as you manage to find the right queue in the train station.

Before we left we managed to get into Zhongshan Mountain National Park [钟山风景名胜区] and see the Xiaoling Tomb [明孝陵景区]:







and Dr. SunYat-sen's Mausoleum [中山陵景区]:

It rained a lot, but atleast it made it bearable to walk around.

Which led to interesting rolled-up-trousers-shoe-free fashion.

Expo!

So we finally got to the Expo (after Tanya generously let us steal her tickets for a day - Thank you Tanya!). The place is HUGE, and we spent most of the day (and a bit of the evening) just wondering around the site looking at the pavilions, and considering the fact that most of the queues were 3-4 hours long, we only managed to go inside two pavilions: the first was the Netherlands - which had a very fast moving queue and the Phillpines which had NO queue on the account that the inside held almost zero cultural interest and looked like a cross between a night club and a trinket shop.

Israel had a very funky pavilion

...but it was apparently being held together by duct tape

[Left] There were people sleeping on benches (and on grass) all over the site, and after walking around for 4 hrs it started to look like a great idea.
[Right] Kids with Haibao dolls

Resting in the shade playing cards - please note the 'expo seats' which 90% of people were carrying around.

[Left] British Pavilion [Right] Korean Pavilion with a really cool facade made up of Korean characters

Italian Pavilion

Yangshuo - Moon Hill [月亮山]

On the way to Moon Hill [月亮山]...

Tourists wearing the flower headress, hand made by the local old ladies - who are very persistant in selling them (that and postcards)

Going up Moon Hill [月亮山] requires buying a ticket, and climbing lots of stone stairs. Despite the HUGE 'No Climbing' signs on display at the entrance to the path, we saw a big group of climbers head up there with gear as we were coming back down.

Yup, that's Moon Hill.

At the top of Moon Hill