China: Beijing and the Great Wall

Beijing 18/05-21/05

We took a sleeper train from Xi’an to Beijing. We upgraded to a ‘hard bed’ this time around, which was a lot more pleasant than our previous overnight train. We spent three days in total looking around Beijing. We enjoyed our stay there, lots of places were very interesting but one of the minor setbacks was the multitude of Chinese tour groups! At every popular tourist site, huge groups of Chinese people, usually with matching hats on, would push and shove in order to get the perfect photo closely followed by their tour guide shouting through a microphone! This sort of destroyed the atmosphere in certain places but it was quite funny seeing people wearing matching group clothing!  On the first day we explored the Summer Palace. Once again it was rather touristy but one cool part was the Theatre which displayed props used in the old Chinese Operas and some actors were actually performing on the old stage which really brought the whole place to life! We also went to see the Olympic Park. This was a surprisingly lively and fun place although the smog made things a little hazy! For dinner we ate the famous Peking duck which was delicious! It was served with cucumber and plum sauce although it was a little different to the one at home as they served us nearly every part of the duck including the feet! 

The Summer Palace

The Summer Palace theatre

A performance in action

The 'Bird's Nest'

The 'Bird's Nest'

On the second day we visited the Forbidden City overlooking Tiananmen Square. As we gazed at that very famous photo of Mao, as if on cue, marching Communist music started belting out of the tannoy and water fountains began dancing and jumping in time with the tune!  The Palace was very grand and as it’s still all mostly authentic you can start to imagine what life was like for the dynasties. As expected, it was jam packed with tour groups our favourite of which being ‘The Fiji Police Force’. We also walked through Tiananmen Square which is surrounded by grand communist-esque buildings such as ‘The Great Hall of the People’. In the centre of the square is Mao’s mausoleum where it’s possible to see him embalmed body. Unfortunately whilst walking around we started to get caught in a dust storm! Every few minutes a large gust of wind would blow dust into our face and eyes so we headed to the subway for some respite! Our next stop was ‘The Temple of Heaven’ which was where Emperors used to come to pray for a good harvest. It was a very beautiful and unique structure painted with deep blues and greens. In our busy day we also managed to fit in visiting ‘The Lama Temple’ which is a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery. It was a large complex with many different shrines and had an aura of peace and tranquility in stark contrast to the hubbub outside!

The entrance to the Forbidden City

Tour Groups asssssemble

National Museum

Tiananmen Square & Forbidden City

The Temple of Heaven

The Temple of Heaven

Tour Group Mob

Lama Temple

Lama Temple

Our final excursion whilst in Beijing was of course a visit to the Great Wall! We’d decided to pay a little more money for a tour in order to get to a slightly less touristy part of the wall. The area we visited was called ‘Mutianyu’. Our guide was a slightly odd Chinese man called Tony whose English accent made him sound like he was from Only Fools and Horses! En route he provided us with some history of the wall and explained that we’d have three hours to walk along the wall on our own and then we’d be having some lunch. Once we arrived we could either walk up 2000 steps to reach the wall or take a chair lift- we of course chose the chair lift option! We were really lucky with the weather as it was warm with blue skies the entire day! When we reached the top you could see that the wall stretched continuously along the top of the mountains! It was beautiful!- and what’s more, it wasn’t heaving with people, so we were able to explore at our own pace! A lot of the wall has been reconstructed for the safety of tourists but if you walked to one end you could reach an old rubble section which had been there for around 700 years! The wall was originally built 2000 years ago by Emperor Quin, the same man who made the Terracotta Warriors. The wall was rebuilt many times afterwards but the most recent time was in the 1300s during the Ming Dynasty. We walked along taking lots of pictures and absorbing the atmosphere. We’d assumed that it would be quite an easy walk along the wall but actually there were continuous steep staircases moving up and down the mountain ridges! Our route down was quite unique as instead of walking down the 2000 steps, we were able to take a toboggan! It obviously felt a little strange at first to be tobogganing at the Great Wall of China but it was actually really fun!

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