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Published: December 3rd 2007
Stunning Mutianyu great wall
and surprisingly not many tourists (until 11am that was)After our push and shove experience on the metro in Shanghai where Donna had somehow lost her flip flop, we were a little traumatised. A little more prepared this time we used the 'elbow, blocking with rucksacks and a Donna donkey kick' manoeuvre to good effect, working in unison to get where we wanted (i.e on the train to Beijing)...we surprised even some of the Chinese with our skills. On board the train we were shocked at how nice it was compared to our hard sleeper experience...but it should have been nice for the amount we paid for the ticket. The train even had a proper toilet (not a squat with piss all over it!), soap and running water, what a luxury! Our cabin mates were two Japanese guys who were really funny, they had a bag solely for their gadgets and we had to talk to their video camera and introduce ourselves! The stewardess wasn't too impressed with them though as she seemed to think that because they looked Chinese they should speak Mandarin...when they didn't reply to her she huffed, gave a dirty look and refused to get them anything throughout the journey! She was really nice to us
though.
Arriving into Beijing at 7am there was a noticeable difference to Shanghai, there were no signs directing to the metro and the people willing to help wanted money; there were also a huge amount of hotel touts. After a while we just ended up yelling at them to go away. It was freezing cold, we just wanted to find the metro and get to our hostel! The metro in Beijing is a shocker...you have to buy your tickets from a lady in a little ticket booth, the system is so old. We noticed that the metro is being upgraded but it doesn't look like it will be ready sometime soon and our immediate thoughts turned to the Olympics...there is no way this metro will cope with large numbers of people unless rapid upgrading occurs soon!
Beijing is changing...so fast that even the Lonely Planet map (from May 2007) was out of date. The Beijing authorities have built new roads and made small roads into huge dual carriageways which resulted in us getting really lost. A nice guy on his way to work stopped and helped us out, going out of his way to guide us almost to
Grumpy guard in front of Olympic countdown clock
He was not impressed with Neil taking a photo and soon after this he held up his hands to which Neil said "Im taking a photo of the clock ...not you stupid" our hostel door. The hostel room we had in Beijing wasn't as good quality as the other hostels we had stayed at...it was all right, the toilet smelt (as dirty water/sewerage leaked), it was very noisy and the staff were on another planet. This was Beijing after all!
We headed straight out and had a walk around Tiananmen Square, we were so excited to finally be here...so were the 1000 other Chinese tourists there! We even had two teenagers ask for a photo with us...and yes, we asked for 10 Yuan but they pretended not to understand us! One of the first things we noticed about Beijing was the huge number of Army personnel on the streets. They were everywhere you went, Beijing is the only place in China we saw this and to us it seemed that the Government were making a bit of a show of 'we are watching' to keep people in line. The people in Beijing were rather wary of the Army, hurrying out of their way every time one came near them (if only they had that sort of respect for non-Army people!). We, of course, being the rebels we are, we made the
Donna caught up with an old friend
I think his name was Jackie or something! Army walk around us...what were they going to do, arrest us?
Beijing, like Hanoi, is a capital which doesn't really feel like a capital city. It is nowhere near as developed as we expected, although the Government is in the process of changing the city totally. Everywhere we went there was construction, renovation and demolition ongoing. The worst instance of demolition we saw was that of the old Hutong area near Tiananmen Square. These old buildings which dated back to Genghis Khan's occupation of Beijing had been bulldozed to be replaced by more of the 'fake old' we saw in Shanghai. This is mostly for the Chinese tourists that visit, as it seems to be what they want to see. To us, coming from the UK where we do everything we can to preserve our heritage, it is such a shame that these buildings have been destroyed. It was nice to wander around what Hutongs were left and see locals shopping and shop ourselves for the fantastic mandarin oranges and other fruit by use of sign language.
We got quite annoyed looking for restaurants in the Hutong area...we looked at the Mandarin signs outside the restaurants and there
seemed to be nothing over 12 Yuan (70p) on the menus, so we would ask to see the English menu and the prices would be 38 Yuan (£2.60) upwards. Did these people really think we were that stupid? (don't answer that). In the end we found a good restaurant which served huge portions of food for 70p a dish. Two tier charging is one of our pet Asian hates, the Chinese are definitely not paying 38 Yuan a dish. We don't necessarily mind this two tier pricing if the locals have little money, but in our view the city dwelling Chinese, in general, have far more spending power than your average backpacker.
We weren't too keen on viewing Chairman Mao's pickled body, so we opted for the Forbidden City instead. It was absolutely FREEZING and a miserable grey, misty day, as you can see from the pics. The entrance fee was about 45 Yuan, which is reasonable for access to all of the city. However, what pissed us off is that the 3 main - and most important - Halls in the centre of the city were closed for renovation and will be until 2020. An important fact that
Olympic tat being sold
...one world one dream....one giant puddle of puke! the ticket office neglected to tell us when buying the ticket. GRRRRRrr
Our number one sight to see was the Great Wall...but we wanted to do it the easy way. There was a 'trek' option where you trek 10kms from one point to another, we couldn't be arsed and opted for the minibus to the Mutianyu section of the Wall, 90 km from Beijing (less touristy). On the way we saw some strange developments which remarkably resembled British and American housing estates...so weird! Luckily it was a nice day with no mist and blue sky and we got there early enough to avoid the tourist hordes. We did this with a Swedish couple, one of which we managed to lose on the Great Wall for 2 hours. The Wall was one of the highlights of our trip so far. It was amazing to see the mountains and the Wall snaking into the distance.
Our final sight of Beijing was the Temple of Heaven which was a load of pants. The reason being - AGAIN - renovation! But we only found this out after paying the entrance fee. We did see a fight outside the Temple, however, which was
funny but also a little disturbing. A Chinese guy was pulling a Chinese woman's hair whilst he was being battered over the head with an umbrella by a Chinese granny. Two kids were jumping up and down screaming and crying and another Chinese guy was smoking a fag laughing at them. In fact there were a bunch of Chinese people staring but not intervening...we wondered what the etiquette was in a situation like this, do we intervene if the locals don't? So we stood and watched for a good 10 minutes until they started hugging and laughing.
Feeling like we had done as much of Beijing as we would like in 4 days, we booked onto another 12 hour hard sleeper train journey to Pingyao west of Beijing.
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