Adventures in Asia: Beijing, China

We began our last full day in China with a walk from our hostel to the Temple of Heaven.  The walk there was disappointingly and surprisingly unpleasant, but once inside the park things were much more relaxed and peaceful.

There were numerous groups of people doing exercises and dancing, but the biggest group was a one hundred plus people in a big circle singing together from song sheets.  People came and went as we walked by, joining in as they came.  It was quite something, and they were really good!

We walked right through the Temple of Heaven park, west to east, and out the other side.  There we were more or less right across the street from the Pearl Market.

We were much more pleased with the Pearl Market's selection of goods, prices, and attitude toward bargaining than we had been at the Silk Market.  We bought make up, sports jerseys, a scarf, and so on, before heading back to the hostel just before noon.

We checked out of the Leo Hostel and made the transit trek out to our favourite Beijing Capital Airport Hotel, where we had stayed before going to Mongolia and North Korea.

Our Asian adventure ended with a quick early morning China Eastern flight from Beijing to Shanghai; a much longer China Eastern flight from Shanghai to Vancouver; a four hour layover in YVR; and a quick WestJet flight from Vancouver to Edmonton.  Thanks to the International Date Line, May 28, 2016 is the longest day I have ever lived.  Beijing's time zone is GMT +8, and Edmonton's in the summer is GMT -6, so if my calculations are correct, May 28, 2016 lasted 38 hours for us.  Needless to say, we were very tired when we got home.

Adventures in Asia: Beijing, China

Our plans for today were much less firm than our plans had been yesterday.  Andrea had visited the Forbidden City back in 2008, and she was unenthusiastic about seeing it again, although willing if I wanted to.  On Tuesday, when we had walked through Tiananman Gate and along the Forbidden City's moat, I had not felt especially compelled to go inside.  It was quite crowded (it is the most visited museum in the world, I read), and relatively expensive (about $12), and looked rather overwhelming.

Since then, however, I had I realized I wanted to visit Jingshan Park to take advantage of the views it offers of Beijing and especially of the Forbidden City.  The fastest way to walk from our hostel to Jingshan Park was by cutting through the Forbidden City, so I decided we may as well do this.

So after breakfast at McDonald's we headed up Qianmen pedestrian/shopping street and into Tiananmen Square.  As we walked I told Andrea about Mao's Mausoleum, in which Mao lies in state.  The mausoleum lies in the middle of Tiananmen Square, and we had looked at it on Tuesday without knowing what it was.

I had brought it up simply because it was interesting, but as we talked about it we both started thinking we should try to visit, so we stopped by en route to the Forbidden City.  The queue was long, but moved steadily, and soon we were inside the building (where unfortunately no photos were allowed).  Volunteers and guards ushered people along, making sure the line kept moving.  We passed Mao's body, looking a little orange but otherwise very dignified.  It was quite the interesting experience.

Back outside we continued our way across Tiananmen Square and into the Forbidden City.

There were certainly many, many people, but the Forbidden City is very, very big, so it did not feel terribly crowded.

We did not rush, nor did we dawdle, and we certainly did not pause for selfies (although we did have to dodge some selfie sticks).  We exited through the north gate, "The Gate of Divine Might."

Now we were across the street from Jingshan Park.

We entered the park and headed straight up the hill to the pagoda at the top.

From here we had an excellent view of the Forbidden City, as well as some of Beijing's skyline.

There is also a Buddha up in the pagoda, so it is an active religious site as well as an ideal lookout for tourists.

From Jingshan Park we walked and walked through hutongs and main streets to reach the subway.  The hutongs are fascinating, but also make navigation difficult, so we walked further than we had to.  Anyway, eventually we reached the subway and we took it to the Silk Market (where, surprisingly enough, they were advertising that Laureen Harper had shopped there!).

The Silk Market is much more upscale than Andrea remembered from her time visiting in 2008, so we walked around without doing any shopping.  We decided we would try out the Pearl Market the next day and hope for better.

We had booked (and even paid for) an acrobatic show through our hostel for that evening, but somehow the staff really dropped the ball.  We were in the lobby in plenty of time to meet our transportation, but the receptionist told us they had failed to book our tickets.  It was much too late by now to go.  This was probably my biggest disappointment of the entire trip, because it was simply incompetence that prevented us from going.  They refunded our money and we went for another walk in the hutongs instead.

One interesting thing about hutongs it that there are public washrooms located every block or so.

They are simply rooms with multiple toilets but no stalls, and no sinks.  Apparently most homes in the hutongs lack toilets, so these public toilets are not for tourists or visitors, but neighborhood residents!  I think most of the hutong homes must also not have kitchens, because we frequently saw people cooking and eating out in the street as well.

Adventures in Asia: Great Wall of China

This morning we took the subway to the Lama Temple stop (you can see Lama Temple poking up behind the trees across the road).

Here we met up with Fred and Heidi, the owners of China Hiking.  They had kindly set up a Great Wall group hike for today specifically because I had requested it, and we were joined by a couple of Swedish girls, who had taken the train from St. Petersburg to Beijing.  The four of us, plus our guide Heidi and a driver, left Beijing in a minivan and drove northwest out of the city for about two hours, along highways and past other parts of the wall.

We reached a little village in the mountains where we stopped to eat lunch at a local restaurant.

After lunch we drove a little ways out of the village and to the trail head.

Heidi, our guide, the two Swedish girls and Andrea and I set out along a gravel farm road while our van and driver headed off to meet us "on the other side."

Quickly the road ended and we were on a narrow, overgrown trail.  At one point the brush was so thick that even Heidi lost the trail momentarily.  We made our way up the hill, switch backing occasionally, and getting further and further away from civilization.

Eventually we could see the wall above us.

 And then, after about 45 minutes of hiking, mostly uphill and through brush, we reached the wall.

We walked on top of the wall for a couple of incredible hours.  We literally had the wall entirely to ourselves, and more than that, it felt like we had the entire mountain range to ourselves.  There were literally stretches during which we could see no signs of humanity other than the wall and our little group--and this just two hours outside of one of the largest cities in the world in the most populous country in the world.

The portion of the wall we walked on is actually what was the wall's base, on which fortifications had been built but are now gone.  Unlike some of the normal tourist destinations, none of the wall has been restored.  Japanese soldiers removed some stones from here during World War II, and during the Cultural Revolution Chinese people were encouraged to dismantle the wall, but nonetheless it is in remarkably good condition.

It extended as far as I could see both behind and in front of us, a ribbon of white along the ridge of the otherwise mostly green mountains.

Eventually we descended the wall and began our descent down the other side of the mountain.

This trail was not quite so rugged, and we passed several types of purple flowers and berries on our way down.

We descended for about half an hour or so before we started encountering farmers' fields.  When we finally reached the road, the first person we saw was a farmer leading his mule.  It seemed like a picture from another era.

A few minutes later, we were waiting for our ride . . .

. . .  when another farmer walked by.

So our Great Wall hike turned out to not just give us a great time on the Great Wall, but also provided a glimpse of agricultural life in the mountains northwest of Beijing.  Once back in the van, we continued descending through several more villages.

Most of the homes in these villages had solar-heated hot water tanks on the roof, such as this one:

All of us (driver excepted) fell asleep during our drive back to Beijing, but I was awake long enough to be extremely impressed with the efficiency of the highway/ring road system.  We were not stuck in traffic once, even though it was around 17:00-18:00.

Back in Beijing we took the subway back to Qianmen, where we celebrated our hike with a Peking duck.

Its presentation was much different than we expected, and at first we were not sure what to do with the wraps, cucumber, and celery, but we managed.  It was so good!