Mark & Jen's 'Around the World' Travel & Photography Blog

Tuesday, July 21: Datong
From Beijing, we boarded a sleeper train for Datong. A smoky 9 hours later, we arrived to a city of a ‘mere’ 3 million people. Datong is known predominantly for three things — the 1,400 year old Hanging Temple, the Yungang Caves, and the fact 1/3 of the coal China consumes is [...]

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One day in Beijing is equivalent to smoking 70 cigarettes.
We cannot even begin to describe the number of people here. For five days in Beijing, we pushed and bumped and exchanged sweat with what feels like a million people. In the Forbidden City and Temple of Heaven, there were so many people we had to [...]

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One of the perks of our budget accommodations is one is never quite sure the type of amenities (or lack thereof) that will be provided. It turns out our hostel provided us with numerous amenities — too many to count, actually. We woke up after our first night to discover the clothing we had left [...]

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Have you ever read The Thornbirds or perhaps seen the movie? Imagine a 152,000 acre sheep station in the middle of the Australian Outback. Built in the 1930’s (the original homestead having burnt down), corrugated tin roofs cover plywood-thin walls. 3,000 sheep (and what seems like a similar number of kangaroos) call this place home, [...]

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Mark’s health continued to improve slowly, so we made our way to Karijini National Park. Maintained by both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, the park hosts sacred spiritual sites of the Aboriginal people. Crystal-clear pools of water at the bottom of gorges juxtapose dramatically with the endless, arid desert surrounding the park. After camping out under [...]

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