China - Beijing (1/3)
This post is part 1 of the "china-2013-10" series:
I spent over two weeks in China at the beginning of October. Unlike past trips, this one was voluntary (not for \$DAYJOB), and the rest of the family joined me. Denise actually spent a week in the middle of the trip of on her own tour in North Korea (DPRK), while David & I travelled quite extensively around by train to the cities of Xi'an, Chengdu, Zhangjiajie & Shanghai. We were all together for the first few days in & around Bejing. Then we split up, for the next week, and then we met up again for the last 4 days, and went down to Guilin. I'm going to split the trip report into three parts, since doing 16 days worth of travel all in one would be way too long.
First is the departure and time in Beijing, however you can skip ahead to other posts:
* Big loop via train, including Xian, Chengdu, Zhangjiajie and Shanghai(2/3)
* Beijing to Guilin, and back(3/3)
We flew Korean Air the entire way to China, with a brief layover in Seoul/Incheon. Our flight left SFO on time, but we only had an hour to make our connection in Seoul. So we were running like mad through Incheon, through security, but we did make our connection with about 15 minutes to spare. The second flight to Bejing went fine, and Chinese customs/immigration also went smoothly. Because the airport is almost 50 miles outside of the city, we had to take the airport train to the subway, and then change subway lines to get to our hotel (for 3 nights) in Beijing. While we didn't have any major problems finding the hotel, despite it being buried deep in the maze of Beijing hutongs. The biggest obstacle was that the 'main' alley in the hutong was ridiculously gentrified, lined with tons of tiny shops & restaurants, and literally thousands of people crammed in there. So a walk which should have taken maybe 10 minutes, ended up requiring about 30 since it was so incredibly crowded. We finally reached the (tiny) hotel, got checked in without any issues, and prepared to go to bed for the night (it was nearly 10PM at this point). However, apparently some random Chinese family decided that 10PM was the ideal time to eat dinner in the courtyard outside our room, and proceeded to carry on a loud conversation until nearly midnight. Despite that, we did manage to sleep relatively well, and awoke before 6AM (thanks jetlag!) the following morning.
<p>
<center>
</center>
</p>
The plan for the day was to go on a biking tour up to the Great Wall. However, since we were awake more than 3 hours before we were to be picked up for the tour, we headed out for a walk in search of breakfast. We ended up eating at a few different food carts, which were quite tasty. Our bike tour guide arrived on time, and escorted us a few blocks down to the main street where he had a large van waiting (with bikes in back) to drive us about 80 miles north of the city. To say that the traffic was horrible would be a vast understatement. We happened to be in China during their big holiday week (October 1 through 7), which is when the majority of people are off work, and travel either for fun or back to their home towns. As a result, all forms of transportation tend to be incredibly crowded. To say that the Chinese drive like complete lunatics would be polite. The roads were incredibly crowded. On top of that, the Chinese have absolutely no patience whatsoever for traffic. So the moment they are stuck behind any other vehicle, even if its blatantly obvious that there's a long line of vehicles in front, they feel compelled to find some other path forward. Even if that means cutting off traffic in another lane, driving on the sidewalk, driving the wrong way down a one-way street, or driving in the lane of oncoming traffic. They absolutely _must_ cut ahead at any cost. Even when their cutting ahead is a large part of the reason why traffic isn't flowing smoothly. Also, they feel no obligation to pull off the road at all if they choose to stop for any reason. Need to stop for a bathroom break? Just park on the road, everyone else can drive around you. Want to stop at a roadside fruit stand? Park on the road, people can move around you. After driving those 80 miles for nearly 2.5 hours, we finally reached a point which was about 10km (6 miles) from where the great wall crossed the road. We stopped, the bikes were pulled out of the van, and we proceeded to ride the rest of the way. Ordinarily, this road has very little traffic, as we were heading to a portion of the wall which is not normally part of the big tourist circuits (Badaling, Mutian, etc). However, this time the road had a continuous stream of traffic, which made biking a bit of a contact sport. Most cars made no effort to give us any room to bike, and the road never had a shoulder, or any place to ride other than in the lane of traffic. As a result, we always had cars, trucks & buses honking and speeding past us. Despite all of that, we got to the wall safely, and it was quite an impressive site. The road itself was at the bottom of a steep narrow valley, with the wall running down both sides of the valley. Before we actually started to climb the wall, we stopped for lunch (which was included with the tour). The restaurant itself was fairly crowded with other Chinese tourists, which we took as a good sign that the food was decent (and not western tourist garbage). The food was quite good, and we left quite stuffed. Despite that, we were faced with a non-trivial hike up the steep hill to the wall itself. As we hiked, we passed a sign noting that this portion of the wall was "closed for restoration", not that anyone seemed to pay any heed to the sign. Finally we reached the wall in all its glory. To say that the wall is steep is an understatement, as it seems to mock the slope of the hills and attack them at their steepest point. Why anyone thought that building a wall up the steepest side of a mountain was a great tactical defensive decision is a mystery to me. However, that's how it was built most of the time, which made walking the wall a full scale workout. As narrow & steep as the steps on the wall happened to be, the portions that were 45+ degree ramps were even worse. How did people do this routinely hundreds or thousands of years ago when they were responsible with patrolling? It was crazy. I ended up walking the distance between two watch towers, which was not short. Denise & David actually proceeded to a 3rd watch tower as I caught my breath and pondered the insanity of it all. After that we hiked all the way back down to the road, where the van was waiting. The ride back to Beijing took nearly 3 hours (for 80 miles), which was a result of the incessant stop-n-go traffic, mostly triggered by people driving like idiots. Once we got back to Beijing, we then needed to take the subway across town to the Beijing West Train station. The way China's railway system works, foreigners cannot purchase train tickets from outside the country, so instead they must use a 3rd party to purchase them on their behalf. Since we were in the midst of the crazy holiday week, we absolutely had to get our tickets well in advance, or we'd have a very real chance of not getting any tickets at all. As a result, the tickets were purchased 3 weeks in advance, but I had to pick them up in person from an authorized railway office. So we went to the train station, and got in line to claim 7 different sets of tickets. The poor woman in the ticket booth had a look of sheer panic when I had claimed three sets, and wasn't done yet. Thankfully it went smoothly and we had all our tickets in hand for the next two weeks of travel. However, at that point, it was dinner time. Unlike the absolutely excellent, amazing hubs of travel that are Korean & Japanese train stations, the train stations in China have very few dining options, and those that do exist are rather poor quality (McDonalds was commonly the only option). As a result, we wandered around outside the station hoping to find something better, but even outside the station, the options were limited & not terribly great. We ended up eating at a place called "California Beef Noodle King U.S.A.", which is apparently this chain of Chinese fast food restaurants now also known as "Mr. Lee". The inside of the place was decorated as if it was Christmas. The floor was filthy (random food, napkins, mystery items). The service was quite literally someone taking our order, taking our money, and then serving the food. The food was mediocre to say the least. But we didn't get food poisoning, so I guess its a win?
<p>
<center>
</center>
</p>
We slept marginally better that night, in that there wasn't a family eating dinner right outside our room. We awoke early again the following morning, and our plan for the day was to explore a few different areas of Beijing. We took the subway out to the area of the Temple of Heaven, and then proceeded to search for breakfast. We found a few decent food carts, and got some tasty stuffed pancake like things. We then headed into the vast park complex that surrounds the Temple of Heaven. I had been here before, the last time I was in Beijing, so I was reasonably familiar with the layout. We saw lots of groups of people doing random group activities, like dancing to music, taichi, exercise, etc. The temple was its usual crowded impressive self. We also experienced the first of many instances of random Chinese people pulling David aside to take his picture (usually posing with him). Next we headed back on the subway to the Forbidden City/Tiananmen Square area. As soon as we exited the subway, we could tell that the entire area was going to be a zoo. There were easily tens of thousands of people, and it was a very slow walk just to get to the first entrance gate of the Forbidden City. Once in there, the line to purchase tickets had a few thousand people waiting. We watched the line for a few minutes, and it wasn't even moving. We quickly concluded that it was going to be an exercise in frustration to attempt to buy tickets & get inside that day, and so we started looking for the exit. However, for reasons that remain a mystery, we couldn't exit the Forbidden City from the same place as we entered. Instead, you are dumped out a side entrance which was easily a 20 minute walk from where we entered. Once we wandered back to where we started, we crossed the street to head towards Tiananmen Square. Unsurprisingly, they had an airport style security barrier setup for everyone attempting to enter the square. Not much exciting going on in the square, beyond thousands and thousands of (mostly) Chinese people wandering about. Afterwards, we headed towards the area in front of the National Museum, and sat on a park bench for a while, watching people. The highlight was this guy selling ice-cream bars, who was putting his stash up in a tree branch. It was quite bizarre. Next we needed to head to the east side of the city, where Denise needed to go to a meeting for her North Korean tour group, which was leaving the following morning. While she was meeting, David & I explored the neighborhood a bit. It was this odd assortment of huge western style mega malls, foreign food restaurants, and tiny run down stores. We did end up finding a pretty decent supermarket, where we stocked up on bottled water. For dinner we ended up going to a Persian restaurant nearby, which had pretty good food.
All trip pictures are posted HERE.
This post is part 1 of the "china-2013-10" series: