All Good Things Must Come to an End

Goodbye, loyal blog-readers! Tomorrow we begin our multi-day journey home (via Hong Kong & LA, where we're spending a few nights and seeing some friends).

It's been the trip of a lifetime! And for the trip awards...We agree that our Favorite Activity was probably the Machu Picchu trek, way back in Peru (with the Nile cruise coming in a close second); the Most Different/Interesting Country was India (and the Best Food although Turkey deserves an honorable mention for the Iskender Kebab); the Pleasant Surprise award goes to China; Most Insane City goes to Cairo; and Most Memorable Sight goes to....yes, you guessed it...the surprise barefoot TEMPLE FULL OF RATS in India!

Thanks for following along on our round-the-world adventure. Happy holidays & we'll see you soon!

Foiled!

This is as close as we got to the Great Wall today...(don't worry, that's not our van). We tried to go to the Great Wall today to do a 8K hike, but when we were almost there, our guide decided that it would not be possible to make it there and hike, due to the weather.

Beijing!

After 72 hours in bed (I like to say it was SARS but Jeff and Chinese TV ads remind me that SARS has been eradicated, so I guess it was just a nasty cold), I am back! We overnight trained it to Beijing, and today we vistited Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, and some of the Olympic venues (which were indeed very cool). There's a nice layer of smog hanging over the city, which makes for dim photos, but here's a shot from the Square, note Mao's portrait in the center.

Anyone for a game of street ping pong? (Cousin Scott beware, I haven't actually been traveling around the world for the past three months, but have been attending an intensive ping pong camp to hone my skills for the annual holiday competition. This kid is 8-and-under province champion and I beat him 21-15.)

We are now in Pingyao, China, southwest of Beijing. We arrived this morning (Dec. 5) to a biting chill... a cold front came through NE China last night and it is FREEZING. Even the locals seem unsettled by the weather. Pingyao is an historic merchant town and now a popular tourist destination for the Chinese (though not so much in this weather). The old city wall and moat are still intact, and inside the city walls Pingyao is well preserved with old buildings lacking the in-your-face commercialism that we've seen elsewhere in China... no bootleg North Face jackets or Lacoste shirts here. Krista is very sick, but hopefully the combination of western pharmaceuticals and Chinese herbal remedies will have her feeling better by the time we're off for Beijing in a few days.

The famous Terracotta Warriors in Xi'an. This is a shot from one part of a tomb from a maniacal Chinese emperor from 2000 years ago... To make sure he would be protected in the afterlife, he hhad his minions spend 40 years creating an army thousands strong of terracotta warriors to surround the tomb where he would be buried. Apparently no two warriors are the same. Soon after he died, his tomb and many of the terracotta warriors were destroyed, then left dormant until the 1970's when Chinese farmers pulled up some fragments of the tomb when drilling a well.

Krista in the dining car on the highest railway on Earth... we were traveling above 15,000 feet for most of the first day on the train from Lhasa, Tibet to Xi'an China. It was a 36 hour journey in total with beautiful mountain scenery... very enjoyable, except we shared a sleeping compartment with a very ill woman who got Krista incredibly sick (hence I have been called in off the bench as back-up blogger).