Our last stop on the mainland
Trip Start
Jan 31, 2006
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17
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Trip End
Dec 11, 2006
Beijing, China
Saturday, April 22, 2006
We were rudely woken at 6am by a stewardess knocking on our cabin door to ask if we wanted tea or coffee and to tell us that we would be arriving in Beijing early. Having barely managed to get any sleep at all due to the noise and movement of the train, this wasn't particularly welcome! Richard packed up our stuff and I dragged myself off of my bunk to get ready to leave the train.
Our first glimpse of Beijing was the view from our taxi as it whizzed through the quiet streets at 7am and my first impression was that it was an enormous city - by far the biggest we had been to in China. It also seemed greyer than the others, but that may have been as a result of my very tired, not so happy, mood after our train journey! We arrived at our hotel (the Fuhao) and, unsurprisingly, due to the ungodly hour of our arrival, we weren't able to check into our room
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.Tired, grumpy and grimy after the train journey, we decided to pass the time until we could get into our room properly by walking to the Kempinsky Hotel which was said to have a great deli where we could have breakfast. We consulted the map in our Rough Guide and set off for what looked like a 30 minute walk. Two and a half hours and many pollution-filled ring-roads later, we finally arrived at the hotel. Clearly we had not paid enough attention to the scale of the map! A decent breakfast and a cake lifted our spirits a little and we headed back to the hotel, this time by taxi!
After a short nap, we braved the streets of Beijing again, this time going on a much shorter walk around the shopping areas. We were really tired, so had an early dinner and then went back to the hotel to sleep.
Day two was sightseeing day. We got up bright and early and walked to the Forbidden City, which was thankfully very near our hotel. It is an enormous, and very impressive, complex of 800 buildings dating back to the 15th century. A lot of the architecture was beautiful and the displays of weaponry and armour very interesting, but unfortunately, as with most of the city, the main ceremonial halls were covered with scaffolding and out of bounds as they were being renovated for the 2008 Olympics. This, coupled with the fact that most of Beijing seemed to be visiting the Forbidden City at the same time as us, meant that after about an hour and a half we had had enough, so we headed out in the direction of Tian'anmen Square. It was an odd feeling to see a place that we had only seen before in television reports showing the terrible massacre in 1989
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. It is a vast concrete plain dotted with statues and monuments, and is surrounded by railings, for crowd control, which means you can only enter or leave by gaps at either end or in the middle. Seeing it left us cold so we decided against visiting Mao's memorial (his body is taken out of the freezer every day and put on display) in the middle of the square and instead walked down to Qianmen.Qianmen, according to the guide book, is a bustling, old fashioned shopping area full of weird and wonderful shops. However, the vast majority of the main street was completely boarded up, no doubt with plans to be renovated for the Olympics, so we gave up and had a quiet afternoon instead.
We became a little disheartened at this stage. Getting around Beijing seemed so difficult because of its size and, having been travelling in China for 3 weeks, we were quite tired. So, although we were supposed to be staying in Beijing for 4 more days, we decided to move our flight to Hong Kong forward by a couple of days.
Of course, this is when we started to enjoy ourselves a lot more! That night we went to the renowned Quanjude restaurant which specialises in Peking duck. It had an entire menu full of weird and wonderful duck dishes made out of bits of a duck that I didn't know you could eat, but we stuck to simple Peking duck. The duck is presented to you with great ceremony. The chef rolls it through on a trolley, chops off the head and then sets about carving the duck. The back fat is served separately as a delicacy and the chef finishes by chopping the head in half and covering it in the chopped heart. It all sounds rather gruesome, but the duck itself was wonderful
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. We gave the head and heart a miss and gorged ourselves on pancakes stuffed with duck breast instead.After dinner we walked down "skewer street", a fabulous street lined with little cooking carts where you can buy anything on a skewer from beef to octopus to centipede!! Being very full of duck, we limited ourselves to a delicious skewer of fresh strawberries that had been dipped in hot toffee - yum!
A colleague of Richard's Aunty Katie, Rachel, had recently moved to Beijing, and had been very helpful before we arrived with lots of information on Beijing. She also very kindly arranged a driver to take us to the Great Wall, of which more later. So, after a quiet day during which we wandered around in the sunshine and looked around the shops, we met up with Rachel and her boyfriend Pete for dinner. They very kindly treated us to dinner in a Hunan restaurant. Hunan cuisine is notoriously spicy and it was with numb mouths that we left the restaurant having sampled wonderful duck, chicken and prawns, all with healthy doses of chilli. It was a great night - Rachel and Pete were great company and they contributed greatly to the continued lifting of our spirits.
On our last day in Beijing we travelled out to the Great Wall. Rachel had kindly organised a driver for us, Mr Wu, who turned up promptly at 8am to take us to the Jinshanling section of the wall, 110km from Beijing. On Rachel's recommendation we were going to walk along the wall from Jinshanling to Simitai, a 10km hike, where Mr Wu would be waiting to take us back to the hotel. After a three hour drive, we arrived at Jinshanling and started our hike
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. To get to the wall you have to take a cable car up the hill. Just ahead of us were two chinese men who hopped into a little two person car together to be taken up the hill. However, clearly the operators didn't like the size of us as they made us go up in separate cars!! Maybe time to cut back on the pies...At the top we had our first proper look at the wall. It is an unbelievable sight. Although I had seen photos of it, I wasn't prepared for just how mesmerising it is. As far as you could see in each direction, the wall stretched off into the horizon, trailing up to the peaks of hills with watchtowers at the top and down into valleys between them - truly amazing.
We started walking along the top of the wall and were immediately pounced upon by two chinese women. Clearly they were intending to try and sell something to us, but they had a special selling technique. They followed us along the wall for at least an hour, not saying anything, apart from to tell us to be careful at the treacherous bits. When we stopped, they stopped. When we started walking again, they started walking. We had known that people would try and sell things to us and follow us, but while Richard could ignore them, I just got more and more annoyed about it to the point that it was really spoiling the walk for me
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. Eventually Richard called them over to tell them that we wouldn't be buying anything from them and to ask them to go away and of course they said that they would only go if we bought something. It infuriated me that we were being blackmailed into buying something as they knew full well that they were ruining our walk by following us. We refused to buy anything, but gave them 20 RMB (less than two pounds) and told them to leave us alone. It worked and from them on we had the most wonderful walk.It was quite exhausting as the wall goes up and down incredibly steep hills and, as a lot of the wall in this section is in its original state, quite dangerous in places as parts of the wall have crumbled or collapsed. But standing at the watchtower at the highest point of this section felt like being on top of the world.
After about 3 hours of walking we reached the Simitai section of the wall. We had reached the end and it was with incredibly weary legs that we climbed the last enormous flight of stairs to the road that led to the car park. However, we had one last thrill as you could get to the car park in two different ways. One was to walk, the other was by zip slide across a reservoir. We chose the zip slide! It was fantastic - a really exhilarating way to end the walk
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! We staggered back to meet Mr Wu exhausted but incredibly happy.We arrived back to our hotel at about 6pm and decided to make our last evening in China a memorable one by going to South Beauty, a Sichuan restaurant that was highly recommended by Time Out. The food was stunning. We had one of the specialities - beef cooked in hot oil. They brought a bowl of boiling oil that contained river stones (which are supposed to promote healing) to our table and, while we covered ourselves with our napkins, they plunged the beef and vegetables into the oil. The result was amazingly tender beef with enough chilli to bring a tear to your eye. This, coupled with beautiful prawns and shredded pork, made for an outstanding meal which we thoroughly enjoyed. We toasted our time in China with Yanjing, the local beer, before going back to pack for our return to Hong Kong.
