Hello.

Me and a few friends are planing a travel to (among other) China, we plan to documentate our adventures on a blog. My first though was to use Blogger, simple to set up and simpler to use...  I had heard rumours of the chinese authorities blocking "some" western sites so i checked the forums just in case... i was rather chocked when if found out that most western sites were blocked most of the time, especially the blogs... Apparently the blogging of emo-teenagers , conservative-in-closet-anarchists and disgrunted housewives from the west is a threat to mighty Red-Sun China... 

 Anyway i then looked at the possibility of  blogging  in  a Chinese blog , i thought myself very cunning untill i  visited one , i didn't get very far  ,  the uterly  foreign langage combined the chinese love for  banners and articles  at the blog portal made me unable to even find the login .

 On top of that i learned that the Chinese authorities have no qualms in blocking and censoring the information channels of their own countrymen, meaning that even if i managed to , their is no garanties that the chinese blog don't get blocked as well. With the OL coming up and the sence of paronaia growing high among the defencers of the Revolution, I'm not sure it's such a good idea anymore.

Now i'm thinking of making my own blog (using movable type or something) in some host-server. I feel very cunning again, there is no site to talk about so the Chinese authorities can't sensore nor will they care as only people who know our adress (friends and family mostly) would be able to access it... protecting the innocent minds of China of our immoral capitalistic and libertarian propaganda .

But now i'm starting to think it seem a bit too easy , blogging on our own servers, do the chinese authorities put a stop into accessing most known hosting sites as well? This is what i would like to know, would hosting our own blog escape the great firewall of China so that we don't have to mirror blog on 3 different blogs at anytime just to be sure we can blog through the whole travel...

 Another question is about the neighbooring countries we're visiting, I think Russia is rather tolerant when it comes to blogging, but i'm rather unsure about Vietnam and Cambodia. Also i wonder if they also block eachother information channels for not having the right brand of Sosialism Ideology...

Anyway i'm asking a lot of questions there, but most important is if you know wether a blog hosted in some hosting site might escape the chinese firewall and sensorship. I might add we have no political ambitions we just want to publish posts and photos of our travel and hope to make a whole continious blog rather than starting a new one in each country we enter through our travel...

Tuco (the Ugly)