Petrochina Yanshan International Hotel Renqiu

Dear friends,

We arrived safely in Beijing, no delay or missing lugagge. Our trip went well, our flight from London to Beijing got upgraded from economy to economy plus! Although we didn't sleep a lot because we watched a ...

... in the centre of the city, really close to the Forbidden City and Ti'ananmen. It's another massive (69 hectares) imperial park full of more little rockeries, a spiritual garden, pavillions, towers and another huge (39 hectares) lake. We were fortunate enough to stumble across a group of old folk singing their hearts out in one of the pavillions (check out the video).


Finally satisfied that we'd packed in a decent ...

... of the major sites from the motorway, already crawling with tourists, so it was fantastic to arrive at 'our' bit and see no one apart from ourselves for as far as our eyes could see across miles and miles of wall.

At the highest point on top of a watch tower we could look over Beijing in one direction and Mongolia in the other, just miles and miles of wall twisting through the hills.

After the hike we stopped with a family ...

... goosestepping in our 5 seconds, lucky us.

Next to the Forbidden City, or Imperial Palace. You enter through the massive Gate of Heavenly Peace (that's what Ti'ananmen means) which has a gigantic picture of Mao hanging in the centre of it. The Forbidden City itself is massive - taking up over 70 hectares, with 1000 buildings.

We didn't go into all of them as it would take all week and things kind of start ...

... unlike us (we'd forgotten our Lovely Planet back at the flat) that Mao's mausoleum and the Forbidden City which we'd planned to see that afternoon, close at 12 and 3pm respectively. By this time it was 4pm and too late - damn will have to wait til tomorrow then.

Instead we checked out the nightmarket off Wangfujing - a bustling place serving among other things BBQed scorpion, seahorse and starfish on sticks.

We passed ...

Well, you have to have a good appetite and a tough constitution. Eating sea snails, scorpions, sheep's penis, silkworms on a stick, starfish, giant crickets, etc in the night market is a lot of fun, mostly for travellers. Beijing is an exciting city and lots to do. It is huge - 18 million people!

... we were at Tianjin. We cleared customs and immigration and came out of the airport to take a bus to the train station. Our intention was to take the rapid train to Beijing.



Soon we arrived at the station and got our tickets. They cost RMB 58 each. The train arrived not long after and we boarded it. This new rapid train service was built in time for last year ...

... asked if I was a girl - *******) to Baoding we went out to a cheap German all-you-can-eat buffet which was really quite good even after my low expectations on the last De-wei (German) restaurant we had gone to. The beer was wonderful and there was massive amounts of meats, but I still couldn't kick the stomach thing I had. We went back to the hotel and spent the rest of the day enjoying what we paid so much for and hassled so much over. 28th: The ...

... of humanity are staggering. I've found myself alone. Clay headed home to perform in Tuacahn this summer under a fantastic contract in My Fair Lady and in Cinderella at the beginning of May. We sort of lost track of the blog as we were traveling up the East coast of China. Eventually we did actually make it to Beijing... unfortunately Mao was not there. I was seriously disappointed not to get a close up of his pickled forehead. Apparently he is in renovation. Even Mao can't ...

... way up Taishan, the fifth most holy mountain in China, and the tackiest tourist attraction this side of the Pacific, I'm sure. The next two days we pulled consecutive centuries (er, kilometers) the last couple days, actually a fair bit further than that. Yesterday we were on the road for 12 hours, perhaps 10 of that riding. Today we're resting our tired dogs in Huimin, five riding days south of Beijing (thankfully, none of them centuries). We've been through some of the ugliest ...