Day 294 - It's a long way you know

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The initial plan for today was to go and visit the Great Wall of China. But after Melinda could not find us a reasonable priced driver who would take us there we decided to change the plan which seemed not so easy to grasp by Melinda, who kept saying after every suggestion of places we wanted to visit “then we go to wall”. Anyway we became the tour guides for most of the day as we visited the Military Museum, with about 600 other school children, a visit through a park with all the fantastic blossom out in full bloom, and then on to the CCTV tower to get a view of Beijing. All this was not really up Melinda’s street and she soon got bored and spent a lot of time using her mobile phone or sitting down. This sounds harsh, we know, but when we wanted her to help with a translation of a plaque or a conversation we were having, she had disappeared from where she said she would be if we needed her, which annoyed us.

We then visited the Summer Palace, which Melinda knew all about but unfortunately by this late stage of the day, we were not so enthusiastic, as we were both tired of being pushed, shoved and banged into by the many, many rude Chinese tourists and there were millions of them here. So we saw the main spots, the corridor, the house where a child emperor was held under house arrest for many years, the marble boat and the bronze ox. The marble boat was a vain idea of an empress and she had to raid the navy budget to pay for it. Lack of naval power then contributed to a battle lost against Japan, but at least she had her impractical boat. And then we left. It was a beautiful setting, away from Beijing with many lakes and gardens for you to explore but again many of the buildings were being restored, so coming in 2009 would be a better bet we think.

We then ditched Melinda, as we had one too many comments of how far away things were from each other, but Beijing is a huge city and everything would be a long way away with these distances. When you are a tourist you don’t really mind about the distance as you just want to go and see the site. It got a little tedious hearing that distance was the reason why we would not go and visit a site. So we went to one of the Hutong areas which are full of narrow streets and plenty of chaos and found a drink and something to eat in this great little kitsch restaurant. As is becoming a frequent experience the scale in the Rough Guide's map was wrong and we ended up walking home the unexpected 4km or so from there. Lonely Planets are much better.

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