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This is the first part of the journey where we tread on familiar ground. Although there's nothing particularly new to see it will be interesting to see how things have changed over the last five years. Five years isn't such a long time, but this is China. While the rest of the world spiralled into an economic black hole it has boomed, it also hosted the Olympics only a couple of years ago, seemingly using this as a springboard (excuse the pun) to leave it's old image as a developing nation behind and forge ahead creating a new identity, comfortably nestled amongst the rest of the worlds superpowers.
There were mass media reports on how they were going to change the behaviour of the local populace, conforming to the western notions of order and manners. It'll be interesting to see if it was achieved and even more interesting to see if it changes what made our Chinese experience so enjoyable last time we were here. Will the culture shock be as hard as before, will we be the centre of attention everywhere we go, will we just be a few more western tourists in a steadily increasing stream of western
tourists? I'm excited to find out. China, you charmed the socks off me last time, I hope you will again.
The train journey to Beijing was another uneventful one; even the border crossing was fairly straightforward with a short wait of an hour and a half on the Mongolian side, then a three and a half hour wait on the Chinese side. Most of this time was taken up with changing the
bogies, as the track gauge is different between the two countries. This was during the night so we didn’t see any of the action take place, there was just a load of loud banging and violent shunting and lurching, it was hard to ignore but didn’t bother the boys so at least we had some peace during the night.
We arrived in Beijing in the early afternoon and it was beautifully sunny day in the city. It was also really hot compared to what we were used to so we had to shed a few layers before we continued on. When we left the station, we were quickly reminded that China is the most populated country on earth and Beijing is in the top ten of
Ribbon twirling
Temple of Heaven Parkthe most populated cities, there was literally a sea of people milling around outside the train station. We also quickly learnt just how much of an attraction Nate and Gabe were going to be. I left Faye and the boys alone for only a few moments while I withdrew some cash from an ATM and had to literally fight my way back through the crowds that had formed to admire, touch and photograph them. It was actually a relief to join the humungous queue for a taxi just to get away from them all…
Once all our stuff was stashed at our
hostel we didn’t have a lot of time left in the day so thought we’d head on over to Tiananmen Square just to have a walk around as it was only 10 minutes away. This is where we came across our first difference from 5 years ago; there is a marked increase in security. You cannot access the square except by underpass or at a few specific road crossings, all these access routes have metal detectors, x ray machines for bags and security personnel with wands. It wasn’t busy so there was no hold up but I
can imagine if you chose the wrong time of day or the wrong entrance (when a mass of tour groups arrive) you could be hanging around for a while just to get to the square.
Once at the square we just generally wandered around taking in the space and the views of the surrounding buildings. We did make the mistake of buying the boys some Chinese flags to wave around. They really loved them, Gabe especially, the problem was so did the masses of Chinese tourists inhabiting the square. Once they spotted adorable western children strolling around waving their national flag they couldn’t get enough of them. Crowds quickly formed, hundreds of camera phones appeared out of nowhere, huge lenses kept getting thrust in their direction, it felt like we were escorting rock stars around. We had to keep scooping them up and quickly move on to try to keep ahead of the masses. Thankfully they took it in their stride and just kept running off leaving a lot of very frustrated people with very blurred photos.
The next day we went to visit the Forbidden City, so called because it was off limits to ordinary people for
500 years. The centre of power for the Ming and Qing dynasties, these imperial palaces are Beijing’s premier tourist attraction, something that was quite apparent the moment we entered, it was literally bursting at the seams with people. We wandered around trying to admire the architecture and sights but it was just too much, if we stopped for a moment we were mobbed but it was hot and crowded so moving around was a real effort. The only time we found any real peace was when we bought ice creams and snuck into the private courtyard of the shop to eat them.
We left after a couple of hours out of the north exit and walked to Beihei Park, an imperial garden just northwest of the Forbidden City. It’s a pretty massive park with a huge lake that covers half of it, more importantly it’s off the itineraries of most tour groups so was a lot less crowded and we could stroll around with a lot less bother. We spent time just ambling about enjoying the space and also climbed the hill in the centre of the park for some fine views of Beijing and hired and electric boat
to slowly cruise around the lake.
After eating in a local restaurant we realised that the language barrier isn’t such a big issue as before. Most people now know the basics like numbers and foodstuffs and in every restaurant we went to, the menu had ‘some’ English on it, even if the translations were a little odd. When we were here before I remember sitting in numerous restaurants with the Lonely Planet menu reader, trying to match up characters, we never had to do that once here. Although it was still difficult at times trying to decipher the literal translations, which I can only assume were the product of Google translate, it did make things a lot easier.
Another thing we quickly noticed was that there were far fewer bikes than the last time we were here. Not sure as to the reasons for this, maybe the public transport system was vastly improved for the Olympics or maybe everyone’s much wealthier now and can afford cars, the traffic would suggest the latter, although the public transport system was pretty ace.
Our second day in the city we spent at the
Temple of Heaven park, a huge park containing a complex
of Taoist buildings a little south of Tiananmen Square. The most impressive of the buildings was the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests but it was great just to wander around seeing the Chinese people enjoying being in the park in the sunshine. Ladies knitting, Gents playing mahjong and cards, pavement calligraphy, group dancing or
tai chi and the older folk (it’s always the older folk) breaking a sweat on the exercise equipment. There were some crowds in some places but mostly it was peaceful and relaxing.
Although we’ve seen it before we couldn’t leave Beijing without seeing the Great Wall. Before, we walked 10km from Jinshanling to Simatai, this obviously wasn’t an option for us this time so instead we visited the wall at
Mutanyu. This part of the wall was perfect as it had a cable car that took you quite a way up giving some fine views with none of the effort of climbing. We didn’t have huge stretches of the wall to ourselves like last time but it wasn’t too busy so was relatively peaceful. It was a great day out and once again the Wall didn’t disappoint.
From Beijing we had some choices to
make, namely which direction do we travel? We thought we’d either go to Shanghai or Xi’an, but we had real difficulty getting any rail tickets out, due to various expos and shows on in each city and the upcoming Labour Day holiday. There was only hard seat tickets available for each and as the journey was long (~12hrs) there was no way we were going to do that. Our hostel checked into getting some black market tickets and managed to find some hard sleeper, top bunk tickets to Xi’an. The commission for these tickets was huge but it was still the cheapest option and we needed to get out of Beijing so we took them. The journey wasn’t particularly comfortable, the fear of watching a baby or toddler tumble 7-8ft out of bed pretty much kept us awake most of the night but it was infinitely better than hard seats.
We spent a few days in Xi’an and there’s really only one reason to come here and that’s to see the
Army of the Terracotta Warriors. Last time we were here we took a tour organised by the hostel and it was a little rushed, made unnecessary stops and was just generally a
bit poor. This time we did it by public transport, it was really easy, far cheaper and we spent all our time at the site so could take it completely at our own pace. The warriors were just as impressive as last time we were here, so it was definitely worth coming again. Other than that we spent a little time exploring the Muslim quarter buying some souvenirs and took a walk on the city walls which was pretty good.
Getting tickets out of Xi’an to our next destination turned out to be just as difficult as getting tickets out of Beijing, although thankfully we didn’t have to buy them off the black market this time. We did end up with hard sleeper again but middle berth this time; still uncomfortable but the fall is a couple of feet less, hopefully next time we can score some bottom bunks making the journey far more enjoyable.
Our next destination is Chengdu, somewhere we’re not been to before in China, so we’re back on unfamiliar ground, something we’re quite excited about. It’s also got a lot of Pandas so that should perk the boys up a bit, stone statues could
only hold their attention for so long.
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Johnny speaks
Johnny
China!
Hi, My first trip out of my own country was to China, so it was nice to read and see some pictures from it again. Your photography by the way is really cool. It keeps catching my eye on all your blogs on the front page and I end up reading them, realizing after that it's the same person every time! Do you use photoshop to edit the colors or anything? Just wondering, because I just started a 6 week photoshop class. Keep the blogs coming!