After staying awake for nearly 24 hours, we returned to Bristol last night to find the weather pretty cold in comparison to the 34 degree heat that we experienced the day before!
Anyway, it was another 6am start (I was getting rather used it it!) as we headed to Shanghai international airport (Pudong technically) with our guide yet again.
If you are planning to visit China especially with a wheelchair, I would recommend getting a guide purely to act as a translator unless you can speak fluent Chinese! As predicted the whole airport experience went smoothly apart from security requesting that I stand up, when it was clear that I couldn’t and tried to put the wheelchair through the metal detector even though it was too wide, but I guess that is Chinese security for you.
Our 12 hour flight to London Heathrow (terminal 5B) went pretty quick, apart from the last hour or so and then guess what….we had to catch the rapid transit system again (along with all the cabin crew may I add!). However, there was a benefit of travelling with the cabin crew as they were able to allow us to skip the queue at immigration to make for a quick getaway from Heathrow.
Despite people’s preconception of China as a country it is one of the best country’s I have visited in terms of how accommodating people are especially to people like me, for example that guy in Xi’an who held up the restaurant menus for me whilst I read it and our guide in Beijing, China has almost no system set up to help disabled people, however it is clear that they are really trying to become an inclusive country, even if you have to hunt around for ages to find a ramp!!
Next year, I will be taking a cruse around Scandinavia in June visiting ; Bruges, Copenhagen (again!), Stockholm, Helsinki, St Petersburg, Tallinn and Gdansk in Poland. The plan aswell is to visit Lituainia and Belarus we will see where that goes 🙂