Yalu River Hotel Dandong

On Saturday I boarded a train to Dandong, which lies on the border with North Korea. 25 hours later, tired and sticky, I arrived. It was night, but my first impressions were of light. Artificial light. Tree-lined streets lit from below by green lights, neon-lit shopfronts, a rotating green laser beam searching the sky, moving fountains of colour...

Arriving in Don Dang the contrasts between the economic giant that China has become with all the skyscrapers and continious traffic is dramatically depicted by looking across the Green River into the PRK where we watched one car drive up and down the front three times. The border consists of a single bridge across the river and we watched only t...

I am booked on the sleeper train between Dandong and Beijing. I'm concerned by sleeper trains. Every time a sleeper train is featured in a film, there's a murder. How will I be able to sleep knowing that someone might drive a knife between my shoulder blades at any time? There are certainly some shady characters in the station, but they're possi...

It's not ideal weather for the one full day in Dandong. It's cool and raining, but that's better than being too hot, especially since the next time I step into a shower will be a whole day away after spending the night in a sleeper train. The first thing on the itinerary today is a visit to the border with North Korea. North Korea owns some isla...

We leave the train at Dandong. Some of us have a 1 day tour extension to visit the city. We are met at the station by a Chinese tour guide called Jackie. "Like Jackie Chan" he points out. There's not much to do on the first evening except check in to the hotel and go for a meal. It's a welcome change from the hectic tour schedule of North Korea....

Ni Hao, ich bin wieder in der Freiheit! :-) Wer haette das gedacht, das ich das jemals von China sagen wuerde, aber Nordkorea ist tatsaechlich ein wenig wie ein Gefaengnis, da man nirgendwo rumlaufen darf ohne Guide und auch keine Fotoaufnahmen ohne die Erlaubnis des Guides machen darf. In Dandong haben wir gesehen: - den oestlichsten Teil der g...

Three of us spend a day in Dandong to break the long train journey from Pyongyang to Beijing. It is not a beautiful city and there was also not much to see but we still had a nice day there. We started by visiting the "One step point", this is the closest you can get to North Korea in China. It is really just one step away, but I can't say it wa...

Je suis parti pour Shenyang via Fuxin une ville ou il brule le charbon a gogo. En arrivant, on ne peut que penser de la nuage jaunatre de pollution. Les batiments sont pour la plupart carre avec un look froid ou peut-etre c'est simplement la fraicheur du matin et ma colere d'avoir eu doit a etre reveille a 3hr du matin pour changer de place. She...

Dandong. Oh Dandong. Dandong was wonderful. It was the smallest city in China that we went to, and it definitely showed. The people were much more kind, I think 5 of the 8 people on our list of 'people who smiled in China' might have come from Dandong. AND Dandong was where we went to the Great Wall- which was by far our most favorite experienc...

There are many ethnic tribes/villages in China and I was going to visit 2 of them today - the Yao and Zhuang. The villages are located about an hour and a half N of Guilin, in the mountains. The Yao village is famous for its women with long hair. Their hair is cut only once in their life, when they reach 18. Many older women have hair that touch...