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Regular readers will recall that Imagethief recently accompanied Steven Schwankert of Sinoscuba to dive a section of the Great Wall that lies underwater in a reservoir at Panjiakou, near Tangshan. A prior blog post about that trip is here. We had an Associated Press camera crew with us on that trip, and their video ran on various television ...

The Denver CBS affiliate has more of the AP video of our trip to dive the Great Wall on Sunday. This clip includes two brief segments of me in full cold-water regalia talking about the experience. Somehow I appear to have upstaged Steven, who actually organized the trip and also talked to camera (sorry, Steve). Be warned: You have to sit through ...

Along with Sinoscuba impresario Steven ''Commando'' Schwankert, Imagethief hauled himself and approximately four tons of gear out to Xifenghu on Sunday to dive a sunken section of Great Wall. Xifenghu is a reservoir near Tangshan. It takes about three and a half hours to drive out to and, as we discovered, nearly six to return from when your ...

China mavens will know that China has tightened up its visa issuance regulations significantly in recent weeks. There has been much piecemeal reporting on this, but it has been hard to find good, comprehensive information on the situation. While several blogs have covered this pretty well, the most comprehensive information I have found so far is ...

This advisory was just sent to us by CITS, the local travel service:民航总局严格手提行李规定 New Regulation of Carry-on Luggage 根据中国民航总局的规定，５月１日开始，在国内航班上持头等舱客票的旅客，每人可随身携带两件物品；持公务舱或经济舱客票的旅，每人只能随身携带1件物品。每件物品的体积均不得超过20×40×55厘米，上述两项总重量均不得超过5公斤。 According to CAAC , new regulation of carry-on luggage will be launched effective from 01May. Base on this regulation, ...

Regular readers will know that Imagethief made his first departure from Beijing's spanking, new Terminal 3 last week. Well, close on the heels of the first departure must come the first arrival, which I made on Sunday afternoon. On the whole it was OK, but the experience left me thinking that, as so often happens in China, imposing grandeur has ...

Imagethief put the “ass” in “business class” last night, when he had the rare privilege of being able to sit at the front of the 747. While I’ve had the very occasional business class intra-Asian flight, this was only my second business class trans-Pacific flight. The last one was thirteen years ago, when I first moved to Asia, and biz class ...

Having arrived in Macau, the romance continues. First was immigration, where the lines crawled as officers stamped arriving passengers in with the indifferent sloth that seemed circa Vietnam, 1996. My immigration officer painstakingly inspected every stamp in my generously stamped passport. It’s Macau. There are only two reasons why I would be ...

As a regular user of China's domestic airlines, Imagethief has learned the hard way that Chinese air travel is simply the bus travel of the twenty-first century. It's been a painful process for someone who still recalls flying Pan-Am from San Francisco to London as a young lad during the 1970s. Those were the days when the 747 was an impossibly ...

Imagethief was interested to stumble across an AP article revealing that Rupert Murdoch's Harper Collins imprint has purchased the rights to a travel book originally published by a Chinese press affiliated with the People's Liberation Army Air Force:A travel book published by China's military will be distributed around the world by a publishing ...