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Published: March 4th 2006
Beijing - 19.02.06
It is my last day in China today and it is with mixed emotions that I leave the place I have called home for the last five months. It is definitely sad and strange to be leaving, especially as we have so little travelling time left now. It seems fitting that we end our Chinese adventures in Beijing; the nations capital and our host for the past 10 days. Beijing has been fun, it has alot to offer visitors and seems to be somewhere where it would be possible to spend some real time.
It's been busy as we've had a lot to get through. We first visited the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square and then we moved on to the Temple of Heaven, the Summer Palace, Dongyue temple and of course the Great Wall of China (twice!), which was undoubtably my favourite. We also found a little time to fit in a spot of shopping, well no trip to China would be complete without a few chopsticks and souvenirs! We had a great time at the market haggling over the price of some chinese crockery, unfortunately it then cost us the money we saved to
ship it all home!
The Forbidden City is a huge complex of buildings and gardens and courtyards etc (some of which were unfortunately being restored when we visited so they were covered in scaffolding). Its the place many different Chinese Emporers called home and is not lacking in grandeur. I think the scale of the complex is difficult to portray in the photos but Will and I spent many hours walking and we think we only covered about two thirds of the giant area!
Tiananmen Square, the place where the ill-fated protests took place in 1989, is the worlds largest public square and a vast expanse of concrete. It's not especially beautiful (to my eye) but it is an interesting place to visit and think about the not so distant Chinese past and also a good place to people-watch; one of our favourite pastimes.
Both the Temple of Heaven and Summer Palace were nice pleasant places to stroll around, despite the cold. Dongyue Temple was also interesting (bizarre!) as it was the first temple we've seen with different rooms for different godly departments covering wealth, crime, life, death, torture etc. Very weird.
The Great Wall at
Badaling was fantastic, despite its restored nature you really feel like you are walking on an important piece of history. It was reasonably busy (aparently in the summer you can:t move for other wall-tourists) but a great day and so good that we decided to see the wall in another location aswell. We travelled about 4 hours by train to see where the wall meets the sea. We were almost the only people there and there was something quite lonely about this section of the wall. Standing at the end of the wall looking out to sea was a mystical feeling and totally worth journey.
All in all, China has been a fab experience and in 5 months we've only just really scratched the surface of the vast landscape it lays claim to so I'm pretty sure I'll be back at some point for some more exploration..maybe even timing it to catch some of the 2008 Beijing Olympics!
PS, we have learnt to ignore people who hang out round the bus stations and try to tell us that the bus we want doesn't go to where we want or doesn't leave for ages. In this case it
was taxi touts (posing as bus drivers) trying to stop us getting the 919 to the Great Wall in Badaling. We ignored their shaken heads saying that the bus doesn:t go where we want and their plees for 100 yuan for a cab instead and just got on the bus. Surprise surprise we ended up at the wall as expected. Pesky tricksters!!
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