Beijing

The train journey to Beijing was one of the more enjoyable ones as the whole troop from Mongolia was on it. The 26 hours flew by. At the Chinese border we had to change the bogie's under the train because the Russian and Mongolian tracks are wider than other parts of the world. We were brought into a shed and the carriages were hoisted up and the new bogie's were slotted underneath.

We made it to Beijing around 2.00 in the afternoon. The scenary was pretty special on the way in, lovely mountains and even a few snap shots of the wall. We arrived anyway and it was a bit of a shock after Mongolia, as you can imagine. We booked into a place near Tianamen Square. Took a walk that evening on the market street at the hostel. Christ they are serial hagglers, they'll quote you the western price and you can get them to drop to nearly 10% of that!! Mad stuff, you need to be in your health though. Along with the markets there were food stalls and you could get some nice snacks.

We also took a walk up to Tienanmen Square to see it lit up. Its the worlds largest public square and is a lasting monument to Chairman Mao. In 1989 it made headlines for the wrong reasons when a democratic protest turned ugly. It kicked off after the funeral of a supporter for democratic reform from within the Communist party. Thousands converged on the Square and under pressure the tanks were called in. You might remember the famous depiction of the solitary student standing in front of a tank. The death toll ran into the hundreds. The square itself is quite impressive with the front gate at one end and the Forbidden City at the other. Chairman Mao's body is on display in the centre in the "Mausoleum" in the centre.

The Forbidden City was great, with the famous Mao portrait at it entrance it was a bit surreal to be walking through it. It had been off limits to all but a select few for around 500 years. It was only around 1912 or so when the last Emporer left it. It served as the home for the Qing and the Ming dynasties. One of the main buildings, Hall of Supreme Harmony" was under repair and we couldn't access it, but there was plenty else to pass the time.

We came here on a Saturday and got to see the Chinese "tourist" in full swing. The all march after some guide with a loud speaker and a flag, wearing matching hats as happy as larry. Its all quite cordial until something of note has to be seen, then the elbows come out and the pushing starts. Being 6 foot tall had its advantages here.

For lunch we headed to the Wong Fujing Snack Street. Its a long street with food stalls, normal enough stuff as well as Scorpions, Star Fish, Cockroaches and Sea Horses to name a few. Carla, Anna and Pete all tried the Scorpion, myself and Lucia chickened out and had the chicken!

Next stop was the Temple of Heaven Park. This was where the Emporer used to come to pray for a good harvest. The park was a nice spot and offered some good views of Beijing. Also in here is the echo wall. Apparently if you whisper at one end of the wall the sound travels along the wall and can be heard at the other side. Its not so easy to test nowadays with scores of Chinese people with similar hats screaming at it.

We had decided on a pretty tough section of the great wall to do so the day before we decided to take it easy. We visited the Lama temple, which is in fact a Tibetan temple. The place was nice but a bit propaganda heavy if you get my meaning.

THE WALL
Chairman Mao once said "He who has not climbed the wall is not a true man", but I think I prefer the quote from Ghengis Khan when he said with disdain "The strength of the wall depends on those who defend it".

The section we had chosen to do was the unrenovated section between Jinshanling and Simatai, so myself Lucia, Anna and Pete headed off early. We had to get a taxi out here as its about a 130 km round trip from Beijing, about 2 hours from Beijing city centre, really makes you appreciate the sprawl that is Beijing. It only cost us 100 Y each so it wasn't too shabby.

The 2 areas are about 10 km's apart over fairly rough terrain. None of us had attempted anything like this before but with plenty of water in tow and a time scale of 4 hours we headed off. The reason we chose this section was because it is less likely to attract tourist's in great numbers. Areas like Badaling that has been extensively restored can get very full and you'd struggle to move on it on busy days, so we decided to give it a miss.

The first view of the wall is something else, the way it snakes across the tops of the mountains is just breathtaking. Straight away we hit an obstacle though, hawkers! There was a group of about 10 of them and they took to follow us, with their souvenirs and bottles of water in tow. After 20 minutes I asked them if they planned to follow us to Simatai, and I got a response along the lines of "buy something and we'll stop". At this point we had to get a bit narky with them and they eventually took the hint.

After this the journey was brilliant, if not a bit difficult in spots. There was some climbing attached and some of the paving was very worn in places. At one stage we had to climb of one of the towers where the wall had completed disappeared beneath. It was hairy going but I wouldn't have changed it for the world.

We got to Simatai in 3 and a half hours which was good going. At Simatai the wall is disected by a reservoir in between 2 rock faces. Once we got to the top we were faced with a further 2 km hike down which wasn't overly appealing to be honest. It was about this time that mystery option number 2 presented itself, a zipline! Savage craic it has to be said.

We finished the day off with some Peking Duck back in Beijing, good finish to a great day!

Next day we were very lazy, we breezed around the streets and caught a Shaolin Monks show that the hostel had on offer. It was more of a play more than anything else and wasn't authentic but the acrobatics were good and it passed an hour.

We'd met some guys earlier in the week in the hostel who were heading out to a club, it was one of the lads 30th Birthday. After a few Tsintao's, local beer, and some rice wine, turpentine would be closer, in the hostel we headed to a place called Propaganda. It was 70 Y for lads to enter and 30 Y for girls and then all you could drink. After my weeks of taking it easy on the booze this was like a red rag to a bull. In there we got chatting to a good few westerners who were over in Beijing studying Chinese. Their thinking was that in the future this will come in very handy, and to be honest its hard to argue with that.

We left the club at about 4.00 am, it was still going strong inside, with a Polish guy from our hostel named Martin. Our taxi was only gone a few hundred meters when he shouted at the driver to stop. He'd just seen a guy knocked down and ran over to help him. Martin is a snow boarding instructor at home so his first aid training came to the fore. We had to wait an age for any police or ambulance services to show up, the police arrived first but did nothing to help and everyone else just stood and stared. Thankfully the guy handed broken anything and had full feeling in his body so he should be ok.

We tried to see the Mausoleum, with the pickled Mao, the next day but it was closed. This was our last day in Beijing, as we were heading to Datong that evening.

My thoughts of Beijing are a bit muddled. City itself is pretty cool and there is loads to see and do, we could have spent another week pottering around seeing things. With the Olympics next year a big effort has been made to put up English signs everywhere and this made getting around very easy. For the budding shoppers out there, there are some serious bargains to be had.

On the downside the pollution in the city is atrocious. The last day we were on Tienanmen Square and you could not make out the buildings either side of you. How athletes will cope I'm not sure. There is also the underbelly fo the place where you feel that "big brother" is always watching you, you get it first hand trying to surf the web. Sites like the BBC, CNN, Youtube, and Bebo are all blocked and no foreign papers can be found. The english local papers are only allowed print the "happy" news. Its quite surreal to be honest and would definatley turn me off living here.

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