beijing

Right, made the mistake of not keeping up with my postings and am now suffering fatigue as I take this last opportunity to tell everyone about Beijing before we jump on the train to Mongolia tomorrow morning. In short Beijing has so much to offer, particularly if you are lucky enough to know people who would kindly wait for you on the street at 6.30am before taking you back to their place, moving you into their room, take you out to breakfast and generally make you feel at home and help show you around the city.....thanks Pete, Mel, James and Abby for all your hospitality! Of course they are family so I can't guarantee everyone the same level of service that we received....

Cath and Si on Tienaman Square

I know that I wont be able to do the Beijing post justice due to the late hour of the evening so I will make this brief (I have heard that some people who subscribe to our travel pod have often asked for an abbreviated version of my posts so here you are....Royd...). Our first day in Beijing, after arriving in the wee hours of the morning, was a full one. Pete (my cousin) took Cath and I on a tour of some of the sites including the lake and the Hutong area including the Bell and Drum Towers. Stopped at a fav restaurant on the lake which was really nice. After lunch we managed to pick up the train tickets to Mongolia before heading to the Silk Markets to begin to look for all the stuff that Cath and I had decided to buy before arriving in a more expensive Europe. It turns out that having a fluent Chinese speaker when bargaining is a huge advantage although it does tend to really annoy the shop owners who find it much harder to rip you off! Prices started off ridiculously high and would often end up coming down to as much as 1/10 of the asking price..... Didn't end up buying too much at this point because Cath and I were pretty shattered. Decided to come back later when we were fresh and now that we knew what the prices should be. Got home in time to be taken out for some Peking Duck by Pete, Mel and the kids - fantastic but couldn't do it justice...soooo tired.

Great wall 1

Day 2 we headed off to a part of the Great Wall that Pete recommended. The wall was great (ha-ha) and once we got away from the 100 strong Chinese tour group in their red caps and flags in the car park, relatively uncrowded. We spent about 2 hours on the wall and even moved past the end orf the renovated section , onto some of the wall that had not been repaired. This afforded fantastic views across the valleys and out to distant ridge lines where you could see the wall continue on , marked by watch towers every so often. Would love to come back another time and explore, maybe walk for a couple of days and camp on section of the wall that are overgrown, in disrepair and have no attraction to the hoards of tourists... As uncultured as it sounds, a real highlight was tobogganing back down from the wall to the car park.... (I think Pete brought us to this section of the wall just so he could go tobogganing..). Despite the very real risk of sending your cart off the slope, or perhaps careening into the person in front of you, we all headed down at high speed.

great wall 2

Day 3 in Beijing was shopping, shopping, shopping. We hit the silk market armed with an idea of what we should be paying and determination to pick up a list of clothing, shoes etc that would revitalise the wardrobe for Europe. We didn't make any friends that day but we got some bargains. For about 1000y (200 Aus) we got 2 pairs of jeans (D & G no less :), 3 pairs of shoes, 2 jackets and a couple of shirts.... You may begin to notice the transition in appearance in photos over the coming months as the weather cools down and we move on from the 2 t shirts each that we have possessed to date.

For our last couple of days in Beijing we moved out of Hotel Sharp and into the Far East International Youth Hostel which was recommended to us and is in the thick of the action. There is so much to do around here that we feel like we have barely scratched the surface of what Beijing has to offer in our limited time after shopping... We did however get out to the Summer Palace, Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. Promise to post the photos soon. Hopefully I will get a chance to add some more details to this part of our travels as we go. Right now though I am stuffed, have done more typing than I would have done in a week of work and need to get to bed. 30hrs of doing nothing on the train tomorrow to prepare for..

Outside Forbidden Palace

Will get the photos up next stop, probably Moscow....

Pete, Mel, James, Abby and ?