Nanjing: Ancient Capital (Jacco Tours)

Well first off, the hotel today has wifi (AND it’s an awesome hotel called dingding which is a pretty promising name to begin with) but again, no luck getting onto blogger. Ah well, there’s hardly any down time between the 6am wake up calls and constant transfers between cities!   
Today we took an early flight (wake up call at 4) to Nanjing – one of the old capitals of China before Beijing, also known as Nanking (as in the rape of Nanking).  As we get further and further into the tour, there are less foreigners and non-chinese/mandarin speaking people in these small towns.  The Australian people on our tour keep getting stopped by locals who want to take pictures with them!  Anyways, as soon as we got here, we had lunch and we were greeted by our new tour guides James and Fred who took us straight to see the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum – a memorial for an extremely influential Chinese revolutionary/Nationalist (also known as the Father of the Nation).  Then we went to a market before going to dinner and we ended the night heading to the hotel early as we were all exhausted from the early morning flight.  We're told this next leg of the tour features more locations, at the same time it'll also be more time spent in the bus which is great as it's hotter here in the Eastern part of China compared to Beijing.  

For some reason I didn't take any pictures during the flight - I think I was too tired to bother; anyways the photos start at the Mausoleum. 

Shuttle bus (trains) to get to the Mausoleum

Out of respect, photos are not allowed inside, but basically the inside featured a very large statue of Sun Yat-sen as well as scriptures written along all three walls of the interior.  The massive number of stairs (392 steps) is said to represent the number of people (392 million) in China at the time of his death. 

"Dingding Hotel" - hard to beat a name like that

-M