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Published: January 19th 2010
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Ni Hao from the Far East. China has already been an awesome experience.
Day one was a -10 degree brisk and fresh morning but beautifully clear so we decided to walk to the Forbidden City, much to a rickshaw driver’s disappointment. ‘Breath-taking’ sounds so cliché but the architecture really was spectacular. We began at the North Gate, which turned out to be a good move as the building increased in grandeur and exquisiteness as we walked. The names really put a smile on my face; ‘Temple of intense happiness’, ‘Hall of complete harmony’ and ‘Gate of heavenly purity’ etc. Brilliant.
Tiananmen Square was bloody massive and we walked through it onto a gorgeous main street with lots of alleyways with hanging lanterns and the smell of sweet and sour lingering in the air. The abundance of colours and crazy pictograms drew us into a sweet/duck shop before we stopped for some chow mein and spring rolls at a very ‘local’ eatery. No one appeared to speak a word of English, we were so entertaining to them that one of the young girls repeatedly took photos of us eating our meal! A healthy mix of strange blonde and weird dreadlocks, we’ve
Temple of Intense Happiness
Was pretty happy but perhaps not as intense as it used to be... been attractive photos and stares ever since we got here.
We drank all evening, made a lot of friends and learnt to make Chinese dumplings. The next day we went and explore the temple of heaven which I found even more interesting than the previous day with all the locals out for their dancing, singing and games under the cypress trees. The temple was really fantastic and in the evening we went to the neon district for drinks and pizza 😊
The highlight of the week has been our trip to the Simatai section of the great wall, 120km outside Beijing. We decided to try to beat the tourist trail of 260RMB each (about 20 quid) for an organised trip (bus, lunch tour guide etc) that the rest of the hostel goers insisted on. They all thought we were mad but I found out the local bus was only 30RMB and decided to give it my best shot.
This started very badly. Google told us Beijing East station existed but no one had heard of it - even though we had the foresight to have reception write the characters of our destinations, we got nowhere. The map
was useless, eventually we had asked loads of metro station workers, taxi drivers, and locals and no one knew about this phantom train station! Eventually, after what felt like our 100th attempt we found one taxi driver (who spoke reasonable English) to take us there for 100RMB, sadly we had missed our train anyway. Our last attempt at the trip was a long-distance bus stop and we finally caught the bus to Miyun where we expected, after 3 hours, to catch a minibus to Simatai. The bus only cost is 15RMB each and took only 1 hour so, quite pleased with myself, we had our hopes of cheap adventures thwarted again by the absence of said minibus and a 200RMB fare to a taxi driver. China is indeed incredibly hard to travel independently.
After another short hour our taxi driver had called ahead to a ‘hotel’ and reserved us a room. We pulled up at a very dark building and were greeted by an elderly Chinese couple and shown to our room.
Success at last! The room was in fact a wing of a farm house - cold and plain but had a lovely double bed and that was
all we needed. The couple bought us a huge vat of complementary Chinese tea and placed menus in front of us. I literally beamed with smiles as our egg fried rice and pork noodles arrived at the little fold-away table in our room. This was the feeling of adventure I had longed for. We had done it, beat the typical tourist trail of 260RMB each and arrived at a local’s house for 180RMB 😊
The pleasant husband bought us a lovely book on the great-wall for our leisure and insisted on us trying his Chinese smokes, which went down very nicely. He grinned with pleasure at our feeble attempts at Mandarin conversation, and then left us to it. Freezing cold on the outside but warm with pleasure, sense of achievement and noodles on the inside, Fenner and I snuggled into bed together and enjoyed the coldest and happiest night’s sleep of the year so far.
I have no idea the length of the wall that we hiked, only that we spent about 5 hours climbing, stopping every now and then to catch our breath and admire the scenery. I wondered several times about the poor peasants and solders
that worked on its construction, all in an effort to keep out the Mongols, who were only insistent on trading with the Chinese. Surely it would have been far easier and cheaper to set up trading posts? With all that time and money they could have built arks, pyramids, infrastructure, Parthenons etc. But regardless of these musings, the symbol of Chain speaks volumes of what the Chinese people were able to accomplish thousands of years ago, while we were still living in shit/mud houses in the west.
On our return we stopped for a few minutes to debate the use of the zip wire back to the car park at the park entrance - a wire, a few hundred metres high between two cliffs overhanging the striking Mandarin Duck Lake. I had read about this previous to our arrival and was looking forward to an easy ride back to the start. However, I started to feel quite nervous about it and was all-of-a-sudden concerned with the ‘cost’ and decided I’d better save my money and walk the path back to the start again...
Our next stop will be Xi’an for the terracotta army and pagodas of ancient times.
We have decided to give Harbin and Jilin a miss as it is currently -30 and we’re struggling in the current -15. Thanks for the coat mum 😉
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Mark Andrews
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JEALOUS!
Making me so jealous...glad you are both having an amazing time though!!!!