BEIJING AND SURROUNDING AREA

******Note: thanks to the utter and inexcusable selfishness of our so-called friend Raj Malagoda, who clearly believes his two week sunshine break in Sri Lanka and the Maldives is more important than the hugely honourable job of updating our blog, we have been unable to relay the exciting and educational details of our trip for the last two weeks. For our avid readers’ loss we are truly sorry. Thankfully our new best friend Julie “Hoolie” Baxter has stepped into the breach and we are now able to bring you a new, if slightly belated post. A huge thanks to Julie**********



Well of course they had to forbid ordinary people entrance, there’s hardly enough space as it is.

 WHERE: BEIJING

WHERE (less detailed): still CHINA

DAYS: 75-82

WEATHER IS: apart from one day in which the temperature dropped, the wind picked up and our ancestors’ bones were frozen we’ve been pretty lucky and mainly enjoyed crisp sunshine.

managing to avoid the crowds

TEMPERATURE IS: -2 – 10 degrees


PEOPLE ARE: supposedly the dodgiest in China but if this is the worst they get the Chinese better not holiday in India or they’ll be torn apart. One of Beijing’s more heinous tourist “scams” involves some “students” inviting you to their “college art show” and when you arrive at the gallery it turns out to be an ordinary art gallery where they try and flog you some paintings - oh the humanity, can people really be that devious?

Nifty forbidden city architecture

FOOD IS: gorgeous and best of all most menu’s have ENGLISH translations. Apart from one day when we wandered off the beaten track and found ourselves in a small local diner. We thought we’d be pretty safe since the menu featured pictures and the ordering system simply required you to tick the corresponding dish. But for some reason we had our non-English speaking waitress in fits of laughter as we failed to understand the one question she had in Mandarin. Even with her talking louder and clearer we strangely still didn’t understand. Culinary highlight was split between the high-end Peking Duck, the £1.80 stir-fried beef and noodles we found in a shopping centre food court and the 10x 10p dumplings we devoured at the Summer Palace.

what’s hot

and what’s not

BEER COSTS: £1 for a litre of house beer at our Hostel, 29p for a 500ml of Diet Coke


HIGHLIGHTS/LOWLIGHTS: our continual embarrassment at the state of the London Underground in comparison to Beijing’s. A trip anywhere in the city sets you back 20p. In addition all stations are bright and clean and feature flatscreen TV’s on the platforms, in the trains and on some of the tunnel walls....




look away now if you don’t want to know the football scores, just don’t look out the window

....we soon discover the sun in this city is much like a Panda’s ass, no matter which building you try and photograph the sun always seems to be shining into your lens ... the royalty in this country are nothing if not self-indulgent - Mariah Carey’s interior designer is the picture of understated modesty in comparison. They had the gigantic Forbidden City for winter, the massive Summer Palace for when things got a little too hot and the huge Temple of Heaven Park for when they fancied a little pray. All of which is decorative beyond imagination....

The Summer Palace, because sometimes you just have to find a little space in which to escape the pressures of Emperorship

....nearly ruining our first impression of Tiananmen Square by nearly using it as a shortcut to the supermarket.

Now I know it’s a little bigger than we first discussed but I still think it captures my unassuming and modest nature.

..Paul starts his research into the city’s best Peking Duck....nearly getting to see the bloated corpse of Chairman Mao without joining the mile long queue...Paul eats fried scorpion (better than brain)...a visit to the highly politicised Police Museum where we see a Chinese photofit machine. Not sure of its effectiveness: suspect’s hair colour - black, eyes - dark brown, skin - light brown. Right, punch that into the database and we’ve immediately narrowed our search down to 1.2billion... visiting Silk Street market, just a nasty big market with pretty ugly counterfeit goods...our first cinema visit for 10 weeks...Paul continues his research into Beijing’s best Peking Duck...






c’mon Rhaani, I swear there’s an expensive shoe shop just over this hill

 ....Great Wall trip, Great hike, Great views, shame about company, two English tourists who declare at the free lunch “I’m not eating any of this foreign crap.”....Beijing Acrobatic troupe, absolutely fantastic, think Glee meets Cirque de Solei. The acrobats were 9-18years old and while the difficulty level of their tricks was easily a match for Cirque they were unpolished enough for you to realise just how hard it was to pull them off. The best thing was that they missed a few marks at the start of the show so when they built up to the dangerous stuff and brought out crashmats and you thought “Hang on, someone could take a nasty fall here.” Much like having a go on a rickety old rollercoaster where at every corner you swear you can feel two wheels coming off the track or the bolts coming loose. 90mins flew past. So so impressed....

less polish = more entertainment

Paul narrows down his Peking Duck search to 4 finalists....we discover every female Chinese tourist has a photography pose...visiting the Olympic city, Stratford has a lot to live up to.




Stratford 2012?

...we finally try the little clay pots with paper lids that can be found at every street vendour, Turns out they’re yoghurt and cost 20p with a 10p deposit for the clay pot....Paul’s plan to beat the Mao Maueseleum queues by forcing us to arrive at 8am on Sunday turns out to be the same one adopted by another 1,000 chinese tour groups, back to bed....Paul finally decides on our Peking Duck destination. Shunning the popular Quanjude and other recommendations we arrive at DaDong Duck, home of the low-fat, low grease Duck. Absolutely fabulous. The service was pretty terrible. Despite making a reservation and telling them we wanted the duck special we had to wait 1hr for them to cook the duck when we arrived. But it was worth it. Fantastic duck and exquisite pancakes, Moonlight Chinese takeaway on Queenstown Road will never be the same again

Rhaani assumes the position

....the unbelievable disparity in height between ordinary citizens and soldiers on patrol. There must be an army barrack filled with mad scientists and stretching racks somewhere......an American who exemplifies the “loud and dumb” stereotype arrives at our hostel....finally get to see Mao and are rushed through in less than a minute, we spent more time emptying our pockets at security than we did looking at his bloated face....Paul buys a novelty t-shirt with Kung Pao Chicken written on it in Mandarin and within 30mins is using it to try and order food in four no-speakey de English restaurants...just as we’re just about to leave Beijing by train Rhaani is pulled out of our compartment by a manic steward with a camera. At first we worry there is something wrong with our tickets or maybe we’ve taken the wrong beds. Turns out China-Rail have read our blog and want to capitalise on our new-found fame by using Rhaani in their promotional material...

this soldier only appears in the photo because he’s 9ft tall

NEXT: thanks to the unreliability of WL Tay we’re deviating from our original plan to go to Shanghai and instead are heading on a 20hr train ride to Huangshan mountain home to sights such as Purple Cloud Mountain and White Goose ridge.


THINGS LOST: Rhaani’s pair of Teva all-terrain hiking sandals.


THINGS STILL IN LIMBO: our £5 deposit for our hostel in Pingyao which we forgot to collect before we left. So far the hostel has been reluctant to post it to us and are now ignoring our emails.