Alex's Asian Adventure

It would make sense to actually disclose what I am doing on my 3-month travel extravaganza.

The flight itinerary is:

April 17: Toronto -> London
April 20: London -> Beijing
June 2: Hong Kong -> Delhi
July 7: Delhi -> Toronto

This means I have two days in London, six weeks in China and five weeks in India. The London plan is to hang out with my friend Mark Scannell (if he has time off work) or with myself (it he doesn't). The China plan is to be a tourist. The India plan is to trek for a month and try to climb Stok Kangri, 6121m. More on the India part later.

The China tourist itinerary is fairly flexible, but the basic plan is this:

• Arrive Beijing April 21st. 4-5 days in Beijing, including checking out the main sights around town and visiting the great wall at Simatai. I've been told that Simatai is much nicer than the usual tourist trap at Badaling.
• Take the overnight train to Xian around the 25th or 26th. Spend 2 days, maybe 3, in & around Xian. There is a terracotta army to check out.
• Take a train to Chengdu and spend a few days in the Chengdu area. Notable sights include the giant 71m buddha at Leshan and the panda research base. I actually have a hookup with a travel agency in Chengdu, and they can help me organize all this.
• Fly to Lhasa, spend at least 4 days in Lhasa, which is the capital of Tibet. Depending on the situation, I may venture further afield and make a trip to Shigatse, the second largest city in Tibet.
• Fly from Lhasa to Kunming, travel up to Lijiang, hike the Tiger Leaping Gorge. This might take 5 or 6 days.
• Return to Chongqing, and a take a cruise down the Yangtze river.
  
• From wherever the cruise ends (likely Wuhan, but maybe earlier - Yichang), I'd like to travel down to Guilin and unwind. Apparently it's awesome.
• From Guilin, proceed to Hong Kong for a few days to get my act together and fly to Delhi on June 2nd.

There's a lot of flexibility built into this plan. There's actually a fair number of places that I'd like to visit if time permits, which it may not. The list includes:

• Jiayuguan, at the far western end of the Great Wall. This one's kinda unlikely since's in the middle of nowhere and immediately to the west is the Taklamakan desert.
• Wudang Shan (quite doable from Yichang) and the shaolin temple on the mountain.
• Yungang Temple & hanging caves near Datong, which (according to my map) is close to Beijing. This seems very do-able.
• The island of Hainan, strongly recommended by Casey. Someone told me today that it is a lot like Hawaii. I haven't been to Hawaii. I'm not sure if it's my sort of place.
  

Anyway, there are more places to visit than I have time for. For example, I won't be able to make a pilgrimage to Kailash on this trip, nor will I be able to visit Kashgar. However, six weeks is hardly anything to sneeze at and being the active type, I hope to cover a lot of ground.

I'm looking for input into itinerary changes, places to visit. I don't think the bulletpoint list I have above covers six weeks of travel. There's (intentionally) lots of flexibility built in. So give me suggestions.

I'll talk about the (very exciting) India part in a later post.