Beijing

To pick up from where I left this message, we arrived in Beijing early in the morning after our comfortable sleep on the overnight train from Shanghai and we got the tube from the train station to our hotel. The tube here is very old and reminded us the pre-Olympics tube in Athens.

We had booked in a better-than-expected hotel centrally, in a room with broadband internet access. This is a “must” with every hotel we book from now on, since we plan our trip as we go along and internet cafes in China are as common as toilet paper in South America.

2 things did not surprise me in Beijing. First that people continued to spit as frequently as they did in Shanghai and secondly, the city (as with most areas in China) has endless historic sights and monuments that would take months to visit and explore.

The plan was to wake up early every morning and visit as many sights as we could, so all 5 days were packed with sightseeing and that was to cover only the top major things in Beijing.

That was a nice plan. What actually happened was, waking up late every day to explore the city in a very slow pace, stopping every hour for food and drinks. This is not entirely our fault (although I blame Dora for being lazy) as we did not account for the sub-zero freezing weather. Apart from the regular breaks in cafes and shopping centres in order to defrost out brains, we had to call it a day after 16:00 (sun set) as the temperature dropped below -10 Celsius.

Interesting fact: Cameras do not operate in temperatures -10C as the motor of the lens gets frozen/stuck.

Still we did our “duty” and manage to get to most of the places we planned to visit as you can see below from the pictures.

I have to say that we are now officially sick of temples and jade relics or jewellery.

Another bummer that limited the number of places we could visit was that many sights were closed for renovation (possibly for the Olympics).

The highlights have to be the Great wall, the Forbidden City and an Acrobatic show we watched in a theatre one evening.

It is scary to watch what people can do with their bodies. They say for a 10 minute performance it takes 10 years of hard training which is pretty much the exact opposite of anything I have ever achieved.

The weather got us thinking about changing our original route which was to cross from mainland China to Tibet but as the temperatures can get as low as -30 this time of the year Dora begged for a change of plans. An idea was to take a different route to central China and a cruise thought the Yangtze River, but the cost of getting to India from anywhere in China is too high for our budget.

Also, booking online travel is not as easy due to some government restrictions for travelling to Tibet (a visiting permit that is a pain to issue and it is needed before booking any flights). Many tour operators have taken advantage of the situation and run a “cartel” to make you buy their expensive all-included tour packages.

Still we are not sure what we are going to do and nothing is booked (hence the need for internet in the hotel room)

Now we are on our way to Xian for a couple of days and then to Chengdu which is the starting point to both Tibet and Yangtze River. More where we get there, until then enjoy Beijing’s slide show…