Year Of The Monkey 2009: Concluding In Cyberspace

[ prologue / Beijing / Xi'an / Li River / Shanghai / Hong Kong / epilogue]

July 28th, 2009: "A couple of hours more, and we'll be back home in London. And then there's one more small job that The BBG and I have to take care of: deciding what you get to see from the 18GB of photos and video we've shot over the last two weeks. We'll get back to you on that one. We may be some time."

August 1st, 2009: "It's currently a week since we got back home, and we still haven't really had time to look seriously through the photos and video we took while we were in China. As soon as we've sorted through the best bits and uploaded them to various places, there should be an epilogue piece with lots of handy links. Might be in August, might be later, we'll have to wait and see."

October 1st, 2009: "And yes, I do realise it's over two months since we came back from China, and the videos and photos aren't all up yet. Like I said, wait and see."

November 1st, 2009: "Meanwhile, those China photos and videos you've pretty much given up waiting for should be appearing later this month... maybe."

December 1st, 2009: "The main problem I'm having right now is trying to find the time to finish off the videos. Ideally, I'd like to get them up on the web before the end of the year, or failing that at least before the next total eclipse. I'll see what I can do."

January 1st, 2010: "If I get them done before the end of January, it'll only be a six month delay..."

July 22nd, 2010: Well, this is bloody embarrassing and no mistake.

One year ago today, The Belated Birthday Girl and I were standing underneath some clouds in Shanghai trying to look at a total eclipse of the sun. We even took some pictures. So far, you've only seen one of them. Since then, we've been faffing around with the photos from the holiday, meaning to get around to making them public but never quite pulling it off. The more observant of you will have noticed that earlier this year, we went to Japan, and we managed to get all those photos available by the end of the same month.

To a degree, we're still playing around with them. And don't get me started on the videos. (Actually, on second thoughts, do get me started on the videos, that way we might eventually finish them.) But here's what we've got now, and we reserve the right to add or remove items from this list later as we see fit. It's a combination of photos by both myself and The BBG from the various parts of China we visited (as stored on our respective Picasa albums), plus a few videos we made together and bunged up on YouTube.

Hope you enjoy them. And if you don't, consider yourselves lucky that we didn't just hurl all 18GB of raw data at you as soon as we got back. I wouldn't want you to have suffered that. Being a monkey, and all.

London to Beijing
Spank's pictures

Beijing
Spank's pictures
The BBG's pictures
The BBG's Great Wall pictures
Video: Temple Of Heaven, 6.21am
Video: Naughty Man At The Back
Video: The Great Wall

Xi'an
Spank's pictures
The BBG's pictures
Video: Call To Prayer

Guilin / Li River / Yangshuo
Spank's pictures
The BBG's pictures

Shanghai
Spank's pictures
The BBG's pictures

Eclipse Day
Spank's pictures
The BBG's pictures

Hong Kong
Spank's pictures