North East Travel News

Issue 103

Travel has the potential to both impress and help us reevaluate our understanding of the world. Spending six nights in China’s Hunan province made me realise how little I knew about the dynamic country that supplies most of the items I buy from Amazon and discover it offers much for travellers beyond Beijing’s Forbidden City. At the turn of the year, finding Changsha on a map would have been beyond me. Hunan is in China’s southeast and, as I discovered during a six-day group tour, its provincial capital is home to more than 10 million people. Mao Zedong, China’s leader from 1949 until his death in 1976, studied in Changsha. In 1925 he wrote the poem Changsha, which mentions standing alone on Orange Island looking at surrounding hills. Stretching for 3.7 miles in the Xiang River, the world’s longest inland river island bears a monumental sculpture of Mao which is…