And so ends Asia, right? We entered China 4 separate times, and had to clear immigration and customs another 4 times to leave. Good life choices…

Hong Kong/Macau:

• Hong Kong is a great city. We haven’t really enjoyed our city times nearly as much as our other time, but Hong Kong is definitely a city to go back to.
• I am so glad we made friends on our Antarctica trip, and kept in touch. It was great to see them, they let us stay at their place, gave us places to go, took us to Macau, and generally we had an amazing time with them. They are great people, and hopefully we’ll see them soon on another continent!
• Macau was loads and loads of fun. The morning after when we had to fly to Beijing – not so much.
• Our final layover night in Hong Kong before leaving for Australia, we were out to dinner at a local dimsum place with our wonderful Hong Kong hosts. A guy stops at the table, my wife thinks he recognizes the shirt I’m wearing. Turns out he went to high school with us 12 years ago and now lives in Hong Kong! We chatted a second, ate dinner, and had a beer afterwards. Sometimes life is super-random in great ways.

Beijing:

• It was never smoggy or unclear in Beijing. We chalked it up to the cold front coming through and pushing in late autumn crisp, cold weather. I think we got lucky.
• People are everywhere. Cars, buses, sidewalks, sites, everywhere. But they all seemed to have a purpose and place to go.
• The Forbidden City is massive! And it’s pretty and very interesting. The throng at the throne room was hilarious. The Heavenly Gate is still the only place I saw a large portrait of Mao, though.
• Tiananmen Square though…man…what a place. Security EVERYWHERE. And everyone wants to go to Mao’s tomb. I realized on this trip I’ve been to three of the four places where they have a big public embalmed leader (Lenin in Moscow, Mao in Beijing, and the Leaders in North Korea).
• The Summer Palace is a place you’d like.

Great Wall:

• Unrestored section is 1000x better than restored sections – no people, you can feel the history. We hiked for kilometers up and down old and crumbly with no one else anywhere!
• The military owns a piece of the wall where we hiked – it was the edge of a military base. So we hiked in Inner Mongolia for a bit off the wall.
• Camping was freezing but a life experience, the second day was incredibly steep hiking.

Chengdu:

• We are really getting good at using public transportation
• Box Hat street is a real place that the Opera is off of. I can’t read Chinese. But one of the characters was a box, with a hat.
• That massage before the Opera was needed after 2 days on the wall, camping, and general travel.
• PANDAS!
• So, there are only like 2000 pandas left on Earth. 20 of them were at this base. That’s 1% of the entire panda population.
• This was the newest base, opened in 2014, not open to the public yet. There is a base closer to the City with 100 pandas, but is super crowded and you can’t volunteer or get near them at all. There is the main base 3 hours into the mountains where they’ve been doing AI work for years.  Then the final base, Wolong, was completely destroyed in the earthquake. A part of it is open for panda release-into-wild training. You cannot go there.
• The volunteering had more downtime than expected – you could wander and see the pandas, but I wanted to hang out with them more. We fed them twice, cleaned their gardens and cages, and talked to them a lot.
• I loved petting the baby panda so much. It was fluffier than you could possibly image. And happy. And so happy to be eating a carrot. And it was soft. And everything you would expect a baby panda to be like. I want one.

And now, Asia photos, and then onto Australia!

And an updated look at our crazy trip map now…