Solipsism Gradient

On the stopover at Hongkong; amazing place. I bought a new camera today (the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX65) and it seems reasonably improved from my previous FX35. Tomorrow we go off again southwards, first to Manila (weather permitting).

In other news, RBSplitView 1.2 is up. I’m still not satisfied with some aspects, but it should now work OK with Snow Leopard, 64-bit, garbage collection, etc.

In Taipei (Taiwan) on a very brief stop at an Internet Cafe. Everything’s fine as usual, we had much luck with the weather and Kobe/Kyoto, Tokyo and Okinawa were excellent. Japan will be a place to come back to with more leisure in the future.

RBSplitView and its Interface Builder plugin are practically finished and I’m now working on the new Quay. Stay tuned for updates; I’ll try to publish a beta version of RBSplitView for 64 bits/Snow Leopard when I stop at Hongkong tomorrow.

More soon…

The rest of the Shanghai tours were very impressive, visited an old town on the river near Shanghai – an Asian Venice. Then the Jade Buddha Temple, the Planning Exhibition for next year’s World Expo, and a visit to the town’s tallest building; nearly 500m!

Boarding the Costa Classica went well and today we visited Nagasaki, a beautiful and historic town. Next, Kobe/Kyoto and Tokyo…

In other news, I’ve got RBSplitView working in 64-bit mode, also (as far as I can tell) with Garbage Collection enabled. Now I’m working on the updated IBPlugin, which is a little more complex than I thought. Stay tuned.

Did the obligatory Lijiang River trip from Guilin to Yangshuo, indeed the landscape is unique and well worth a visit. Afterward we walked up 900 steps through the arch of Moon Hill.

Then yesterday we flew to Shanghai, where we stayed overnight at the Jin Jiang Hotel; the best hotel of the trip. Then we had a walk through the old town and the Yuyuan Garden. Today we have a few more things to visit before boarding the Costa Classica, our home for the next four weeks.

Internet connectivity onboard will be limited, but I’ll try to post weekly updates during this part of the trip. Stay tuned.

Xi’an was very interesting although all the attractions were extremely crowded – according to our guide, crowded even by Chinese standards, probably because of the trailing end of the national holidays.

Today we flew to Guilin, a smaller city; surprisingly pretty with much greenery, and a small lake in front of our hotel.

We stayed two days in Wutaishan (visited the Hengshan Hanging Monastery as well as dozens of other temples) and now two days in Pingyao, China’s former financial capital, and the oldest still-preserved city (more temples, China’s oldest bank, and zillions of tourists and little tourist trap shops).

Arrived in Xi’an by plane a few hours ago, where we’re staying in the New World Hotel, easily the best on this trip so far, and making up for a rather uncomfortable hotel in Pingyao. There are two busy days ahead, visiting the terracotta warriors.

The train ride to Datong was a little long but we met some nice Chinese folks on board, and chatted with them the whole time.

Datong is an industrial city, 3M people (small by Chinese standards), now beginning to be rebuilt for tourism. Most in-city attractions are closed for that, but the Buddhist grotto outside town is open and very interesting – unfortunately the relics are not in good condition.

Foreign tourists in Datong are still very few and neither the hotel nor the city have useful non-Chinese signage; almost nobody speaks more than a few words of English. Still, it was fun.

Today we go on to Wutaishan.

The great wall section we saw was all restored recently, but even so it was impressive. We went to a section about 130Km outside of Beijing that is seldom visited by foreign tourists. Then to the imperial tombs nearby, which are also supposed to be better than the ones nearer Beijing.

After several hours of traffic jams we also had the famous Beijing Duck, which was indeed excellent. Today we had a visit to the Summer Palace in the morning, and then took a train to Datong, arriving very late in the evening.