Travel

Last week I decided to book a flight to Melbourne to give my support to Waikato Bay of Plenty Magic during their final against Vixens at Hisense Arena in Melbourne.

At Easter we decided to catch up with relatives and check out New Plymouth. We took our bikes to enable us to explore the Coastal Walkway.

Best to take a half-empty suitcase if you visit Shanghai. The shopping is vast and varied, from to the very best brands in the world to fake knock-offs you can bargain hard for.

When even our kids can't ride a bike without a helmet, the wind-in-hair sensation is a feeling they'll never know. For grown-ups it's just a memory.

If you're going to try the most famous Chinese dish in the world, then what better place to go than the place that keeps on winning awards for the best Peking Duck in Peking?

Do you think of huge, bustling Beijing as a city with eco lodges at its doorstep?

You know you're in for a different sort of dining experience when the place supplies disposable plastic gloves. We've come up steep, narrow stairs to a tiny box of a restaurant lined with white plastic walls.

It's easy to think of reasons why China might not be on your places-to-see list. It's so big and so foreign, huh? All those vast cities, language you don't understand, food you might not warm to?

When you're a tourist it's hard to get in amongst the lives of people in other countries. You see them hurrying about on their daily round but there are few glimpses of their quieter times.

Countries are often identified in strangers' minds by what's in tourist shops. In New Zealand it's the tiki, the fern the koru and the colour green. For China we think of panda bears, pagodas, ornate fans and everything decked in red and gold.