Category Archives: Asia

Asia, Japan

Nara, an old capital full of deers

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Nara was the capital of Japan during the Nara period (710-784). It was enough to build one of the most impressive buddhist temples in the world: the Todai-ji. It is also home of hundreds of deers and site of other impressive places, some of them free, that we explain in this post. It is an unmissable city in any trip in Japan. It is small enough to be visited in one day coming from the nearby cities of Osaka and Kyoto. Well connected by train in the region of Kansai, you won’t have any excuse to not come to Nara in your travel to Japan after reading these lines.

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A young deer among the people in Nara streets

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Asia, China

Two weeks in China

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Some days ago we arrived back home after two weeks in China. Although two weeks seem a very short time to visit such a huge country, we have enjoyed a lot of those 14 days in China and have managed to discover some of the most important Chinese jewels. However, we are already thinking of a second visit to this amazing country, maybe to Sichuan, Yunnan or Tibet. Who knows… 🙂

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China, a travel dream fulfilled

We already shared in a previous post the itinerary that we had planned for this trip. Generally speaking, we followed our initial plan, but we had to introduce some minor changes due to the difficulty of getting tickets to enter the Forbidden City in Beijing and the train bookings. The agency that had been managing the train bookings for us told us some weeks before our trip that it was not possible to get tickets for the exact trains that we had requested. Fortunatelly, we had booked our accommodation with free cancellation in Booking.com, as we always do. This made us change our plans as per the nights that we would spend in Xi’an and Pingyao.

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Asia, China

Next destination: China!

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After last summer unique and adventure travel to Namibia, sleeping in a camping tent on the roof of our car, cooking with a gas stove and driving long distances through gravel roads, we thought it would be a good idea to travel this year to somewhere closer, in Europe, and sleeping in hotels with breakfast included… but at the end our inside reality won. We are not tourists, we are travelers!

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The Great Wall – https://www.caracteristicas.co/china/

So we will go to China with the new direct flight from Barcelona to Beijing with Air China, we will spend 14 full days visiting the country, sleeping some nights in the train, having also a local flight, and visiting dozens of places, looking for unique and new experiences and searching for new ways of understanding life, food and culture.

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Asia, Turkey

Cappadocia from the sky

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Everything starts very early. The moon is on the sky shaped in the same way as the Turkish flag. Flying with balloon is magic, quiet and you feel peace while the day starts.

It was a cold morning in the middle of the Turkish peninsula, in Göreme, the heart of Cappadocia, the land made of sculptures and where the people lives underground. One of the typical and unforgettable activities that everyone must do in Capadoccia is a Balloon flight.

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Dozens of ballons fly every morning in Göreme

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Asia, Japan

11 days in Japan with a 7-day JR Pass

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Although Japan might be one of the most interesting and culturally rich countries in the world, most travelers use to have a limited time to visit it. Thus, the aim of this post is to share the route that we completed when we discovered Japan in 2015. We have written a lot about this beautiful country in previous posts, but we wanted to give you a full idea of the kind of trip that we did and to prove that some of the main hotspots of the country can be seen in less than two weeks.

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Tokyo at night from the top of the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower

As we already explained in this post, when flying from Barcelona to Tokyo we did a stopover in Moscow that gave us some time to visit the city and the same happened in our trip back home. This means that we had less time for Japan due to the lenght of our stopovers. Nevertheless, in 11 days and thanks to the wonderful Japan Rail (JR) Pass we left Japan with a good number of must-see places in our bags.

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