holidays

I have seem to have spent an age sitting on the couch. I am soon to be coming up to a birthday with a number that ends with one of those dreaded 0s in. So I thought I should go somewhere slightly different. The other option was spending my birthday in Glasgow, perhaps staying in with a crate of beer and a box set of the 24 series on DVD (sounds fun though!). So this morning I booked a holiday to Beijing, China. Using expedia makes travelling too easy. In the past I have burnt out very badly and I have had to go on an emergency holiday. Getting the flight was usually easy, but getting the hotel was always so hard. So a couple of times I have turned up to places with no place to stay. On reflection I don't think it was so wise to arrive at the airport in Mexico City with no hotel room booked (There was a counter where they booked me a room). I did of course think I was like Jack Kerouac in "On the Road" where Jack and his buddies slept on a car in a Mexican city after they had smoked a little too much blow. Also I have had bad experiences with paying huge amounts for a hotel because I didn't plan anything. I would like to travel by hitchhiking or just get on a truck and wonder around a country. I don't think that China is so exotic. It would be cool to go somewhere like Latin America, but I am coward. One of the tours that Expedia recommended was to do a trip to the great wall of China and shoot weapons. Ex-members of the chinese military would be on hand to help. Yep, that would be a cool way to spend my birthday. I doubt that people would be impressed though. "Oh yeah I went to China and shot at the great wall of china with a gun." Not eco-tourism. I was telling some people over lunch that I was going to Beijing in March. Somebody noted, that should be before the "dust storms start." What! Cool, I can't really enjoy a holiday unless there is a nice bit of suffering.