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Published: September 24th 2013
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Saturday- Day One Beijing to Tianjin and sailing. The cruise company, to our delight, posted a sign in The Great Room at breakfast yesterday advertising that there would be a bus to take us to Tianjin and the port TangGu. Be there 9am it said, the hotel staff knew nothing, we had not been told that this would be happening, so we had plan B just in case.
Plan B was take a taxi to Beijing South train station, a train to TangGu, then taxi to the ship.
And lo and behold a bus did arrive, in fact 3 buses. I'm suspecting that this bus is for people who have pre- arranged transport with the cruise organization. But we climbed on board, no ID needed, plenty of seats, and no questions asked.
The trip to the cruise terminal took us very quickly through the traffic sprawl of Beijing and onto the vast network of highways.
Saturdays and Sundays are the busiest traffic days in Beijing as all cars are allowed to travel. Week days there are restrictions to the days as per your number plate, e.g. Monday cars with plates ending with
3 & 8 can only travel. At present in Beijing there are 20,000 plates and 1,000,000 applying for them. You also need to apply to purchase a car, and with no school bus you need to transport your child to school.
On the school side of things you must live in the area you intend to send your child to school in. So if the best school is in a particular area, the real estate may be ¥75,000 per sq metre. There is a new rich in China with the gulf between rich and poor increasing.
The journey took us through the outskirts and then into the rural farming land. Almost all of the land is cultivated or used in some way. Crops we saw were wheat, corn, some veges, grapes and plantation timber. Very little evidence of animal farming other than a few flocks of herdsman tended sheep and a few chickens. Smog was ever present and most housing high density.
We stopped half way for a "wee" break at a service station. Clean toilets of the squat kind, and no toilet paper of course. Some of the more senior members of our
bus did struggle with this.
The price of fuel was ¥7.62 litre for 93 fuel and ¥8.05 for 97fuel,cheap with a 1:5 conversion rate compared to us at around $1-60 Litre.
Midday we arrived at the grand looking terminal, filled with many waiting staff that made the booking process smooth and painless. No waiting, just efficiently moved from one spot to the other. Photo here, sign here and then IT happened. IT being Martin dropping his newly acquired sea pass card which is your ID/ credit card into the sea as we walked onto the ship.
But this proved just a minor issue with a new card issued within 15 minutes.
After a quick look at our stateroom we spent the day exploring this mighty ship, 14levels of it, complete with a shopping mall, English pub, ice skating rink, and soooooo much more.
6pm we sail into the Yellow sea on our way to the first stop which is 2 full days away sailing, the city of Takaoka, Toyama prefecture, which is on the Honshun island of Japan.
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