China at Last!
We've reached Beijing
| GLocation: 39.943963,116.445465 |
We've completed our first and only pre-planned objective of our trip: London-Beijing by train. It has as expected gone from the banal Wimbledon-Waterloo commuter train, to the rather more exotic sounding Ulaan Bator-Beijing leg of the trans-Mongolian train (which actually turns out to be ram packed with western European travellers).
The fact that every middle class thirty-something and his partner (along with a substantial numbers of older travelers) was especially obvious at the station stops between UB and the Mongolia/China border. The platform would be strewn with Teva® sandal wearing people (all western) carrying cameras of vastly varying sizes, snapping pics of the Gobi-remoteness and the vintage soviet influenced hammer&sickle concrete 'sculptures'.
Despite being as huge as it is, it seems that the Mongolian landscape is fairly consistent. However, towards the end we started going through the Gobi desert. This i found very fetching, if that's the right word. The sands ranged from a white hourglass type to Martian red. It's full moon at the moment so at sunset we could see the moon on one side of the train and the desert sunset on the other. This was probably the most memorable scenery of this part of the trip (though the Chinese section is beautiful too).
That and running into the stalwarts. On the train too was Johno (who'd started in London with us), his friend Patty, the unavoidable Phil, and a whole bunch of others that we'd met on the trip that i've not mentioned before, e.g., among others: lawyer-Julian, ada programmer/alcoholic Ben, kiwi-Geoff & zimbo-Bev (relocating to NZ), and lastly London-born Arwin (of Oriental descent, i think). Arwin keeps having Chinese people come up to him and talking at him, and he's always muttering I don't know what the $#@% they're saying.
Last night we met up with a few of them in a very flashy bar in the Beijing Grand Hyatt - the beers cost more than £4 each for a small bottle! considering that we paid just over 10p for a bus ticket to the Great Wall, this is plain extortion. Needless to say the only other people in the bar were expats and the newly bemonied Chinese.
Yes, and we've seen the Great Wall now, taken our pictures, and (in Becky's case) been struck with vertigo. We got up at 5h30, and caught a local bus to get there (the Badaling section) before the hordes of seemingly all American coaches turned up. We did seem to be the only westerners there when we arrived - the Chinese tourists obviously get up even earlier. To re-use the Richard Nixon quote: "It sure is a great wall". The wall zig-zags into the distance over very picturesque hills for miles and miles. I went quite far, but it gets very steep and exposed in places, so a couple of times I had to leave Becky to overcome the vertigo. This did bother me a bit, but apparently the only trouble Bex had was Chinese tourists taking pictures of her.
Yesterday was also a day for finding out just how unreliable the Lonely Planet can be. It's seemingly most accurate stated fact so far is that Beijing is definitely in China. Certainly, details on how to book train trips for foreigners is hopelessly out of date or inaccurate. We had a nightmare afternoon, doing laps of the huge Beijing West train station, trying to find a place to book tickets to Xi'an (and Beijing generally is a very big and imposing place - not one to be traipsing about unnecessarily in). Eventually, we manged to get something, using hand signal gestures &c. to get, i think, two upper-berths in a sleeper train for tomorrow at 21hoo. The price has turned out to be, contrary to all past experience, cheaper than the cheapest one suggested in the blessed Lonely Planet.
So we'll see how that pans out... Certainly should be a change: up until now we've been staying for free on the 10th floor of Beijing Central Plaza HolidayInn, for free, on points. This is considerably nicer that the one in Dusseldorf. I get a daily paper at my door in the mornings; the room is spotless, with slippers placed next to the bed; a huge bathroom; gym & indoor pool; a friendly (not to say pretty) concierge that sorts out all the cab/communication difficulties; &&. I only hope our hostels further along on this trip meet the standards I'm growing accustomed too - I can only hope.
Off to the Forbidden City next, although it is quite damp here at the moment. And tomorrow off to Xi'an (where in a few days time is probably the next place i'll have 'Net access).
rgds
//richard
