The Great Wall of China and the Summer Palace

The Great Wall of China

We had two days left in Beijing, and it was time to tackle the Great Wall. There are several sections of the wall you can explore near Beijing so there was plenty to choose from, but we opted for Juyongguan, as it sounded quieter than the big tourist attraction of Badaling. Juyongguan also had some pretty steep sections to cover (a part of the guidebook I’d mentally glossed over) so we managed to get pretty high up into the hills!

The wall at Juyongguan has been restored so is in better shape than some of the quieter areas we had also considered visiting (places where whole sections of the wall have apparently disintegrated, so you scrabble over muddy ridges in parts!). It’s a shame we didn’t get to see these areas as well, but Juyongguan ended up being a good choice all round.

Getting to Juyongguan promised to be fairly straightforward from the guidebook – how wrong we were! We made it to the correct bus stop and queued for the right bus – but every time we tried to get on one we were told it doesn’t go to Juyongguan and we should go to Badaling instead. Maybe the buses have changed, probably the language barrier was causing us problems, or perhaps they just didn’t like the look of us (or figured that we should know our place and visit Badaling like real tourists), but every 919 bus that was supposed to be heading to Juyongguan seemed to be going elsewhere. The bus station was a frantic, madcap place and so, rather than queue repeatedly for this bus and wait until we got on one that would take us to Juyongguan, we made the rather reckless decision to just jump on a 919 that wasn’t in the queue, and hope that we got the destination right! We managed to get our ticket OK, but as we watched the destination whizz past us on the expressway on Bradley’s GPS, we realised that we might be going somewhere interesting, but it certainly wasn’t Juyongguan!

Eventually, the bus did pull up somewhere, and it was as we feared – we’d been diverted to Badaling! Now this stretch of wall looked brilliant as we approached, but the crowds of visitors made our hearts sink as we really wanted to explore somewhere a bit quieter. So we started to walk toward the entrance, when we decided to see if the train from Badaling stopped at Juyongguan. Apparently not! Though considering they are on the same train line we thought that sounded bizarre. Or we were probably misunderstanding something again!

We did look at getting a bus to Juyongguan, but as in Beijing the bus stops made very little sense to us. However, a little bit of good fortune led us to a taxi driver who offered to take us to Juyongguan. We haggled a reasonable fee and off we went, feeling a bit frustrated at this roundabout route (and feeling weird leaving behind one section of the Great Wall for another) but excited to finally be headed where we had intended to go.

We finally reached the Great Wall at Juyongguan before midday, and it looked much less crowded than Badaling. It did look steep though! We began the ascent with as much water as we could carry - it was blisteringly hot up there, and with very little shade it was quite tough going at times. Bradley soldiered on but I had to stop a few more times – it’s a long time since the marathon, I think I stretched out my recovery time a bit too much to the point of unfitness! ;o)

The views were worth stopping periodically for though (that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it). Every few steps that you take it does look different, as some sections are so steep that you’re often revealing different parts of the mountainside each time you stop. It is quite dizzying to be so high up and to be always climbing, but the views are worth it! And you do wonder just how the guards on the Wall traipsed up and down here back in the day… they must have been VERY fit. The first section of the wall was the toughest as it was all uphill, and when we got to the top we realised we’d taken over 1500 steps so far! This was less than half way round though (this section of wall was a nice convenient circuit) so after stopping for some lunch (bread and nuts, yum!) and appreciating the quiet (not everyone goes all the way up, so there were less and less people the further we went)  we started to head down the next section.

You’d think going downhill would be easier, which I suppose it was at first, but after a while your legs begin to shake with each step – it’s steep both ways! It is however much quicker going down (you need be careful not to let your momentum take you too quickly forward though!). Eventually we reached a flatter section of the wall, and it was lovely to just stroll along, enjoying the view on this high promenade, and not being surrounded by people (the later sections of the wall were really quiet). Toward the end we managed to take some great photos with hardly any people in – you’d think we were up there on our own!

It took us just over three hours to do the whole circuit, which was great exhausting fun (and we earned our bread and nuts!). We managed to get a local bus back into Beijing, and drove through some great neighbourhoods we wouldn’t have seen otherwise, so avoiding the expressway bus was a massive bonus in the end (though it took twice as long to go half as far!). We had a great day and slept well that night!

 

 

Summer Palace

The next day we had considered visiting another section of the Great Wall, but as the previous day had been quite strenuous we decided we’d potter around the Summer Palace instead, which had beautiful gardens surrounding a huge lake north of the city.

We explored the temples and palace buildings but

mostly enjoyed spending the day walking along the lakeside and crossing the bridge to an island in the middle of the lake, where we stopped to relax and enjoy the beautiful views.

 

I’ve been missing water, so it was great to relax by a lake! You could easily spend a whole day there, and it’s exactly the place to have a family day out – you can buy an ice cream, go on a boat trip or hire a pedal boat, it sounds very British when you put it like that! It was a lovely way to end our time in Beijing.




































We have had a brilliant time in Beijing, it’s a crazy hectic city and the Olympic tattoo is everywhere still, so I’m sure London will also be riding high on that wave for some time. It has been a shame to miss the Olympics actually (well, the second half anyway) but we’ve been fortunate enough to have been able to follow most of it through the news, and in Bangkok most bars had the sport on the TV – it was like going to the pub in Bognor for sport! ;o) Go team GB – what a brilliant performance! And I think the Paralympics are about to start too, so we’ll be listening out for news on that too and hoping team GB keep on doing brilliantly.

One small negative about Beijing was the mouse that lived in our radiator at the hostel – oh dear! We only saw it once and it didn’t seem to leave any evidence of its presence, which was a relief. But just to be sure, we kept all our bags off the floor after seeing it (it was actually quite cute, and my theory is that it is best to personify creatures that otherwise might freak you out, so I unimaginatively referred to it as Mousey in an affectionate voice). Crisis averted!

Oh, and the other negative is that spitting is somehow perfectly acceptable social behaviour, so you can’t walk ten metres without someone spitting on the floor near you. I might have taken it personally, but the problem was so widespread that there was little chance it was aimed at us!

Next stop – Shanghai! Where we hope that spitting is a less acceptable pastime.

Music to blog to: we’ve been writing and photo-editing to a whole bunch of stuff, but notably PJ Harvey, Beastie Boys and Florence + the Machine J

Beijing Part 1...

The flight to Beijing was early evening (Sri Lankan Airlines, they were very good!), so by the time we arrived in Beijing it was 2.30am and we had some hanging around to do. Bradley tried to snooze while I battled through my book (Revelation by C.J. Sansom, thanks Blaggers – finally reading it! – is a pretty gruesome story but very addictive). The airport had some pretty comfy chairs though and it was soon 7am and time for the first bus into town (yes, we could have got a taxi, but where’s the fun in that?).

Beijing is a massive, smoggy city, hot but not too hot, although all the pollution must be responsible for a good degree or two of the local temperature!

As soon as we got off the bus we were delighted to find we were just over the road from the hostel we were staying at, a YHA hostel which all seemed very promising. We checked in and collapsed into bed for a quick disco nap – waking up mid-afternoon to start the day! Oh well, we must have needed the sleep. Since it was a work day, that was day one of Beijing sightseeing over – an airport, a bus, a hostel, and a supermarket for lunch/dinner supplies.

The next day we leapt right into the big sights, starting with Tian’anmen Square and the Forbidden City. Security is tight at metro stations and across the city, but nothing quite like Tian’anmen Square. There are security and police officers everywhere, and entry and exit from the square is carefully controlled. It felt a little uneasy being there to be honest, and bizarre to feel like that amidst hordes of visitors – not like going to Thorpe Park! We moved quite quickly through the square and headed into the much more inviting Forbidden City.

 

The Forbidden City took the rest of the day to explore – it is just immense. The history surrounding each building is incredible – the audio guides we hired were well worth the investment! I felt very underprepared for so much Chinese history – clearly I need to read more about earlier Chinese history, although the chronology of the dynasties is starting to fall into place after a few days of piecing together the things we’ve learned at different sights. Even the entrance – the Meridian Gate – is imposing, and it’s quite amazing to enter the Palace complex and see that it’s only the beginning. After that you hit the Gate of Supreme Harmony, and the enormous courtyard that can hold 100,000 people (that’s a lot of visitors to the Palace!). Then there are three main halls – the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the Hall of Middle Harmony and the Hall of Preserving Harmony. These were used for different purposes – the Hall of Supreme Harmony was the serious one, where big ceremonies took place (making use of the courtyard!), while the Hall of Middle Harmony was more of a departure lounge, somewhere for the emperor to hang out before either heading to a ceremony or meeting with a small group. The most fun place (if you were in good favour) would have been the Hall of Preserving Harmony, where banquets took place (though of course plenty of serious stuff would have happened here too).

North of all these halls are even more halls, smaller but just as important. They are also situated around the Imperial Gardens, which have many knotted Cypress trees dotted around, plus some rocks that apparently look like animals! I struggled to see the animals, but I think there was supposed to be a chicken and a dog in there somewhere… maybe it’s like a magic eye picture, I could never see the space ship or the boat in those either! 

Each hall has a purpose and a powerful name, but my favourite of these was the Hall of Joyful Longevity – I’d imagine that was a popular one! Another great name is the Hall of Mental Cultivation, and this was also a stand out hall to walk through. Some of the sights at the Forbidden City (also called the Palace Museum, if you turn up and get confused as we did) are closed off, presumably because they require restoration, but the sheer number of things to see means you’ll be there for most of a day. So, exhausted from a long hot day of sightseeing, we headed back for a very relaxed night in.

 

The next day was a bit of a late start, so we headed out to explore the hutong (meaning alleyway) in the North Dongcheng district. The main one we had read about was Nanluogu Xiang, and this has been through a load of modernisation to become quite a trendy social hotspot. It had a great atmosphere, and you could buy loads of lovely food from street vendors to nibble as you walked. Darting out from this hutong were several other smaller, older hutong with a little more character – people actually living there rather than working or socialising there.

The smaller hutong definitely have a more relaxed vibe than the rest of Beijing. Rather than eat as we walked through the crowds, we stopped at the edge of Qianhai Lake for some dinner, where we managed to get sweetcorn, aubergines and spicy peppers (very spicy!) with some spiced bread – yum!

 

We’d arrived too late to the area to get into our next destination, the Drum and Bell Towers, before they closed, so the next day we headed back there to make up for it. This was in the same area, so we also went back for more aubergine and sweetcorn for lunch (couldn’t quite face the spicy peppers again!). The Drum and Bell Towers are opposite each other and we ascended the Drum Tower first – very steep steps! Great views though of Beijing, and we even got to see a drum performance using the tower drums within a few minutes of arriving at the top, which was excellent timing. There were five drummers, all drumming in perfect time with each other – also excellent timing!

 

The Bell Tower was more of the same – steep steps, excellent views, but this time there was an enormous bell (rather than several). There was also an interesting legend about the casting of the bell – apparently the bell had to be cast by a certain date or all the craftsmen involved would have had their heads cut off, and as the date loomed, the bell still hadn’t been cast and the craftsmen didn’t see how they could complete this in time. As the master craftsman contemplated the furnace and the molten metal within it, his daughter came over to him, distracted him, and threw herself into the furnace – and then the metal was ready for casting. Nice story! I’m hoping it’s just a legend. Still, it is quite hard to imagine casting a bell that size, so perhaps the difficulty in creating it part of the story holds some truth. 

Next stop was the Lama Temple, an active Buddhist temple a short metro ride away. A key part of the experience (if you’re a Buddhist) is to give the gift of incense to Buddha and there is incense everywhere – it is quite overwhelming! This of course means that there is incense for sale all along the road outside the temple, although there isn’t the hard sell of other tourist attractions since it is a revered place of worship. The temple itself is an incredible complex, with beautiful buildings and several very large sitting Buddhas (even one huge standing Buddha) and each Buddha has a queue of people waiting to offer incense and bow before the statue. It is quite hectic for a place of worship – there are people everywhere, trying to reach each Buddha, though again it is very respectful (less pushing and shoving than other crowded places in Beijing). It was quite hard to get a real feel for the place as it was so busy, so partly out of respect for the serious worshippers we kept our visit brief.

Our final destination for the day was the Temple of Heaven gardens, an ordered and well-kept garden complex housing the Temple of Heaven. We decided to just enjoy the gardens rather than go into another temple – the gardens were incredibly peaceful, with a few different groups of cheerful singers playing along with a hotch-potch of musical instruments, and lots of passers-by (like us) just stopping to enjoy the spectacle along the way. 

There were also groups of older men and women playing card games and board games in the sun, and lots of younger people sat out in the gardens with their friends enjoying the day. It was very peaceful and we decided to join them, resting in the shade of some of the ancient trees for a quick lie-down! 

On the way back, we wandered through some of the more lively streets, and saw what looked like a flash mob (but almost certainly wasn’t) doing what looked like the Macarena (and it definitely wasn’t) in a small roadside park in the dark. It looked like great fun, and there were plenty of spectators! Everyone seemed to know the moves, or I might have joined in! 

We also wandered down a road known as Ghost Street, where you can eat a huge array of Chinese cuisine, with a speciality of shellfish. We even saw some of the live crustaceans trying to escape before they reached the pan – poor little guys! Anything seems to go down here, and a lot of the food was cooked on your table or served partially cooked ready to finish on a hob on your table. A very hands-on way to eat!

This blog has been brought to you courtesy of Talking Heads and Psychic Babble – a nice chilled evening of listening to music, sorting through photos and writing! 

Bangkok Part 2 ...

Bangkok is very familiar, like a cosy armchair. We could explore outside of previously trodden ground, but there is a lot of pleasure to be gained from walking the same streets again and finding new alleyways and food stalls in recognisable places. We’ve done a lot of that while we’ve been here, wandering around and rediscovering the same temples we’ve seen before but arriving by a different, or unplanned route. That’s how we found Golden Mountain again – but sadly it had already closed for the day, so we walked the perimeter and went back a day or two later.

It’s not the most exciting temple, but it has some great views from the top, and the walk up can be quite haunting, as there are lots of ringable bells along the way and everyone wants to give them a ring – but the sound never feels too loud, it is more of a discordant echo.







The haunting is inevitably helped along by the many memorial plaques and photos placed along the walk up. Half way up Golden Mountain, one of the summer storms started to brew, so we took shelter in a handily placed covered picnic table – excellent place for a storm!







 We had a very relaxing half hour watching the rain crash down while staying mostly dry and getting some cool snaps as we waited!

Once the rain cleared, the view from the top was great, though it was a little overcast still. You get a great 360 of Bangkok - and there's one enormous gong at the top, the king of bells! 

 
Next stop was Wat Suthat and the Giant Swing – sadly not an actual swing but instead a huge red gate in the middle of a roundabout

It’s quite a sight and it was once used in Brahmin ceremonies. Much more interesting is the neighbouring Wat Suthat, a stunning temple complex that is a fully functioning Buddhist temple and welcomes both tourist visitors and regulars. 

Although they were very welcoming, we mostly stayed out of the main temple (which has a very impressive interior with intricately painted walls telling a multitude of stories) and explored the temple surroundings.

We’d forgotten how impressive this temple was – it might even rival Wat Arun for impressiveness, and I’m sure the reverence for the temple shown by the regulars made quite a difference to our perception. The atmosphere inside was intense, and reminded me of visiting cathedrals and churches in the UK.

We’ve seen some pretty scary driving while we’ve been here – crossing the road is a bit of a gamble, even when the lights are green, and the buses are no more likely than the cars or taxis to stop for pedestrians. But the most baffling and heart-warming (though terrifying at the same time) sight is seeing a whole family piled onto a small motorbike. There is often a main adult in control, with another adult sat behind with a baby or toddler on their lap, and in front of the ‘driver’ there are sometimes one or two young children standing up or perched on the driver’s knees. This is the Bangkok school run! You wouldn’t get half way through Bognor or Chichester without being stopped for this traffic transgression, but here it is somehow the norm.

Either side of our sightseeing weekend, we had two days from hell, after all the relaxing into our trip enjoyed so far. We had decided we would reverse our trip – instead of starting in the South and heading North to China, we investigated a bit more and realised winter in Beijing might be a tad cold!

In our defence, we hadn’t originally planned to travel in Asia for quite this long, so the route made perfect sense at one point… but with the extra time added on, Beijing was looking to be poorly timed. I guess it’s a good problem to have, though if only we’d thought of this before… still, those last few weeks at home were VERY hectic! So, to maximise the weather everywhere, we are now going to travel Northern China down to Bangkok before we fly to New Zealand (where it should also be very summery – score!). And in order to do this, we needed to secure our Chinese visa earlier than planned.

We always knew it was going to be a frustrating process getting our visa – there are lots of rules and regulations to follow, and a visit to the Chinese Embassy is an essential. The Embassy in Bangkok was confusing enough to start with – when you arrive there, a sign immediately points you to go round the corner – where there doesn’t appear to be anything other than a backstreet full of shops selling passport photos and offering internet and printing (for those emergency visa needs). After a bit of exploring, however, we realised that ‘around the corner’ actually meant over the road, and it was right there in front of us the whole time. Sadly though – our internet resources had let us down, and the visa office was closed (it opened in the mornings, instead of the afternoons as we’d thought). So we gritted our teeth, vowed to come back first thing the next working day (as the queues are reported to be massive). Of course, the next working day would have to be a Tuesday in this case, as the Monday was a Thai holiday!

So we arrived at 8.30 on the Tuesday morning – to discover that the internet was right about one thing, the queues were massive. People were already lined up outside frantically filling in their forms. We joined them, getting all our paperwork in order, and began queuing to have our forms reviewed before we joined the actual queue – you each get a ticket number as if you’re waiting at a deli. We’d picked up numbers already and were hoping our number would be called soon after we’d had our forms checked… but fortunately this didn’t happen as when our forms were checked we were told they also needed to see our travel insurance details, and they required a photocopy of our passports and the stamp of entry for Thailand to confirm our visa for our stay in Bangkok! So those internet and photocopying shops turned out to be extremely useful. We managed to get all these details together before our numbers were called, but then at the counter we were told we also needed to prove how much money was in our bank accounts… so back to the internet we went, starting to panic as time was ticking on and we really needed our visas asap! (One condition of a visa is that you have already booked your flight and arrival accommodation, so we were due to leave the next night!) So back we went, and this time we were there for another two hours waiting for our numbers to be called. And when they finally were… they did accept our applications, but were close to questioning our route and accommodation throughout China, which we haven’t yet booked or confirmed. This is not something we’ve ever read about being a problem before – so we headed off to get some lunch with the knowledge that any moment now we might get a call saying our application had been rejected and needed to be resubmitted.

We’d applied for a fast track visa, so we went back later that afternoon to collect it (feeling reassured by the lack of phonecall, which had been promised if there were any problems). When we got to the counter, however, we were referred to a different window and then asked to wait for an hour before finally, thankfully, being delivered our visas (without any further questions). Mysterious, but we’re just glad it worked out ok! We headed back to our hostel for a tired celebration drink and dinner, and collapsed into bed feeling mightily relieved that we didn’t have to go back on the day of our flight to reapply!

On our final day in Bangkok, we went for a wander round the local streets, grabbed some lunch and a drink while we wrote our finished our first blog, and took a quick walk to the incredible Standing Buddha. It is unbelievably tall, towering over the awed visitors and praying Buddhists (who barely come up to the Buddha’s ankle). With this sight I mind, we headed back to the hostel, grabbed our bags, and boarded a crowded minibus to the airport. Beijing, here we come!

This blog was brought to you with the musical supervision of Gary Numan's latest album, Dead Son Rising! :)