Landing in Beijing
Trip Start
Jul 12, 2007
1
14
Trip End
Oct 04, 2007
Beijing,
China
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Having left London 13 hours earlier, touching down in Beijing wasn't much of a culture shock, just an impenatrable mass of symbols. Sticking with my usual motto when travelling, "taxis are cheating", we attempted to make it to our unbooked accomodation via public transport. I say attempted because it was a huge failure. Getting a bus somewhere closer to the center than the airport was fairly hassle free after asking 5 or 6 random people, you'd think something would be in English given they've got under a year until the olympics! However, that's where the trouble started... Thinking we'd be clever and save a whole $4 on comission we attempted (that word again) to book train tickets out of Beijing in 4 days time, note that this is the beginning of an epic journey to book tickets on our own. So, following the ever trustworthy (can you spot the sarcasm?) Rough Guide we set out to find the "tourist booking office" at the station. Alas, an hour of searching later and still no luck, so we decided to give up for now and hauled our packs onto the reasonably decent subway system in search of somewhere to stay.
On arriving above ground, I calibrated my internal compass and using the Rough Guide's sterling map headed in my percived direction of the hostel. Unfortunately for us, my calibration was about 180 degrees off, which we only realised after half an hour of very sweaty walking with all our gear. I was being stubborn as usual and insisted that I now knew where we'd gone wrong and could remedy the error, Rag was a little less confident though and went to ask directions in a posh hotel (always a good tactic). As it turned out, I had no reason to be confident, we about turned and backtracked finally arriving at the hostel 2 sweaty hours after starting the search. The hostel was, of course, fully booked as was our backup choice but we finally found somewhere reasonable to stay, so all was good. Not many impressions of Beijing in this post so I'll leave that for another one.
