Blogstop

Well my diary is up and running again just before I head home. Apologies for the break but my blog was quite rightly blocked by the Chinese government and I now accept that my previous comments were unfair and incorrect.

I will be trying to upload my diary and pictures from China in the next few days from Kathmandu, as I've already been inputting them onto the nifty little handheld computer I purchased in a bout of retail therapy when I realised work wouldn't let me extend my trip for an extra month. If you are interested, I'll then get round to typing up the diary of my earlier travels before I started the blog, once I'm home next week.

I've spent the last week in the Tibet Autonomous Region and specifically it's capital Lhasa, following just under a week in Beijing and 3 days in Shanghai. This wasn't quite what I intended to do but I had to make adjustments as the Chinese New Year, which lasts about 6 weeks, means all the trains get booked up and I was fortunate to get one of the last seats to Beijing. My good fortune has lasted as the severe weather that's affected much of the country was just a couple of a day behind me - Shanghai had it's heaviest snowfall for 50 years the day after I arrived in Beijing and the capital itself was seriously hit by icy storms once I was safely in Lhasa. I was certainly glad not to be one of the 170,000 people stuck at Guangzhou or the people who had a 60 hour delay to their journey. That would have been an interesting announcment on the tannoy... but actually according to Chinese state TV, people were pretty relaxed abut the whole adventure and were glad that the government was doing its best to resolve it.

Of course, I was only joking about my blog being specifically blocked, it's much simpler for the government to just block access to Blogger altogether. I actually found a way round this annoyance just before I left Beijing for Tibet, but the only internet access I found in Lhasa was so slow as to make using this site, let alone picture uploading, impossible. That was until tonight when I've been put up in Lhasa's only 4 star hotel, due to my flight being cancelled because of adverse weather conditions. This is a little ironic as the reason for choosing to fly rather than go overland was the unpredictable weather.