We're back on line. After leaving Beijing in the early hours of November 1 we travelled around China for six weeks and then arrived in Hong Kong on Saturday, December 11. It was a great journey, although we did have our problems, the biggest being a long running cold for Jan. The second biggest, surprisingly enough, was finding food that we liked. Communications were not easy; we managed to retrieve e-mail in Suzhou and Shanghai by going to internet cafes, but it was not satisfying service; on the other hand we'd only been here in Hong Kong a half day when we had AOL working again.

We're staying in a rented apartment on an island a mile (and 30 minutes by ferry) from Hong Kong Island, the most built-up and central part of Hong Kong. Our plans here are to see a lot of friends, to rest a lot, to read a lot, and to catch up on our internet stuff. We kept a detailed diary during our trip and plan to translate some of that into web material. For example, we'll probably have a long section on taking the train in China and another on seeing a doctor in China. For the moment (and for those with short attention spans) we've written a summary of the places we visited

. We also have accumulated about 25 rolls of unexposed film (about 1000 pictures); some of that will end up on the web — we got a scanner after being here 10 days. (The above picture is from our first week in Beijing.)

Sometime or other we will start seriously planning the next stage of our trip. We were happy to find here a Lonely Planet guide to Vietnam. That will be one of our destinations: either after a return to China, or perhaps before a return to China. If the weather in China seems as if it will be too cold in February we are likely to do Vietnam first.

In case you don't hear from us in another thousand years, have a happy millennium.