I'm writing this in Mike and Shelley's apartment, just after 18:00.
Yesterday was a long day travelling and took 24 hours.
But before I describe that, I want to put it in context.
I have seen this show on TV a couple of times.
The Long Way Around seems to be an opportunity for Ewan MacGregor and his boring (and well-named) mate to be paid to travel the world. Good deal for him. However, whenever I see it, they're always having some emotional moment, worrying about whether they'll be able to carry on or not. Although it's interesting to see the places involved I have to confess I don't care enough whether two very rich men, backed by a huge support team, can complete their utterly pointless journey. So for me, those emotional wranglings just get on my nerves.
Consequently, although my journey here was damned hard work, I'm not going to complain about it, I chose to come here and have to get on with it.
This was my route
View Larger Map
So you can see it was a canny way. Over 9000KM (>5000 Miles Imperialists) in fact.
At 12:30 on 24 August we left Caroline's parent's house in Berlin and drove to Tegel Airport.
Flight 1 Berlin 14:05 - Dusseldorf 15:15
Maybe trying to show the rest of the world how cool and liberal they are, one of the choices of in-flight literature was this (NSFW).
Then at Dussedorf airport as I was buying a copy of Hello Magazine (For Shelley, I didn't even read it honest) I managed to put my passport and boarding card down somewhere.
Pretty dim, fortunately somebody found it straight away and gave me a shout. That could have caused some serious disruption, not least trying to get another visa.
Flight 2 Dusseldorf 17:25 - Shanghai (Pudong) 10:20 on 25 August.
The flight was pretty dull to say the least.
However the back of the plane was pretty empty, so instead of sitting next to a miserable looking bloke as I had been assigned, I managed to get a middle row of three seats to myself.
I finished my book and also watched a couple of rubbish films (What Happens in Vegas and 27 Dresses). I bought a bottle of Johnnie Walker to give Michael as a present for letting me stay over. Inevitably I had a sneaky couple of glasses in the hope it would help me sleep on the plane, but no joy. I did take this rather nice photograph though:
I arrived at Shanghai airport pretty much on time and despite the hassle involved in getting the visa, immigration was a damn site easier than the last time I passed through Heathrow.
Got my bag and then headed out to the long-distance bus station for a bus to Suzhou where Michael lives.
Unfortunately there were no buses, no-one that spoke any English and no signs in English. As my fellow travellers will remember from last time, this was not an easy place to navigate. Even more so when there's clealy something wrong and no buses around. So trying not to aggrivate the hole in my shoulder with the 25kg backpack, I walked back to the terminal to try and get some information. Ther information desk seemed a good place to start. It wasn't.
After thrice explaning where the bus station was and me thricely responding that I'd been and there was clearly some problem, I gave up. On the way back to the bus station a Japanese guy started talking to me, so I pretended not to have already been to the station already. When we got there he was able to read the temporary sign and explained that because of some problem, we had to take a different bus to Shanghai's other airport, Hong Qiao. From there the buses were running.
Unfortunately 13:00 is clearly rush hour in Shanghai. What should have been a 1 hour bus ride took 2.5 hours. 
It must have been bad traffic because even the Chinese passengers (i.e. everyone other than me) were looking out at the queues and making incredulous noises.
When I did eventually get to Hong Qiao buying a ticket was really easy and the 1.5 hour journey to Suzhou was uneventful. Michael met me 5 minutes after the bus arrived and the visit began.
Inevitably it ended at about 03:00 the next morning with a good degree of the whisky gone.
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