On leaving China …

One more train journey brought us to the finale of our long China tour: Beijing. 18 million people, purportedly 9 million bicycles (no, we couldn’t stop singing it), home of the 2008 Olympics. Home too to nice restored bits of the Great Wall, the Summer Palace, the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square and the pickled Mao.

We were really looking forward to reaching Beijing having crossed the world’s most populated country and fourth largest in the world (yup … we’ve done 2 and 3, and 1 is coming!). Of course we had set ourselves up for a fall. The train journey was again great fun with lots of new friends made. One guy watched all of LOTR over the kid’s shoulders (they kindly put on Mandarin subtitles), and it was lovely to see his awed expressions as he watched. He actually had his hands over his eyes at points. We squished in, up to 5 per seat, sharing food with our neighbours. The train was really, really busy … this should have been a clue. We arrived at the start of the week-long Chinese May holiday, described as Golden Week. Well this May 1st to 7th, 44 million people travelled by train – nothing compared to the 374 million travelling by bus. And when we arrived, it felt like most of them had travelled to Beijing.

I remember travelling through a Paris station aged 4. The memory of seeing only legs and being overawed by all those people is still with me, so I wonder what Jenna will remember about Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. We spent our first full day in Beijing fighting the crowds, trying to move on despite hundreds of kid photo requests, being jostled, with the kids unable to see anything but bums. We were bummed out not just with the crowds but with really annoying hotel administrators that got everything wrong with our booking and were churlish in the extreme. We had tried to sort rooms and what was included till 11pm the night before, with no clear outcome. We were hot, tired and in no mood for millions of people. The situation only worsened when we asked if we could rearrange the itinerary to do the things we’d REALLY looked forward to seeing, like the Great Wall, when Golden Week and the crowds had gone and we might be able to SEE them. When the guide said it was impossible … well, it’s very rare I see Joe lose his rag at someone, but he did that day. We determined to put all our arghhh to positive use that night, so to both CITS and the hotel we were shirty, determined and stroppy and thank goodness, it worked. Small but important victories.

We won ourselves a few days of R&R while Beijing heaved under the mass of domestic tourists. We rested, market shopped, watched snooker, ate well and took things at our own pace. OK, it was a shame that we had seen the Summer Palace in a blue funk on day 1, but we could revisit Tiananmen in our own time. The Forbidden City? Well, it don’t half go on. And on. And it was largely under scaffolding for a pre-Olympic makeover. We went through it pretty quick on day 1 and quite honestly had no wish to relive the incredibly crowded experience. Call us heathens, but we’ve now seen quite a few Ming palaces and temples.

After our R&R and having resolved that we did NOT need to pay twice for all our meals etc at the hotel, which were in a much better frame of mind to tackle the Great Wall some days later. We were so, so pleased to have made that decision when we saw the pictures of it during Golden Week – no one could move. We visited the less trodden Yuyongguan section the day Beijing went back to work, and were rewarded with no crowds, an amazing climb and a real sense of having seen the spectacular. As Mao said, “He who has not climbed the Great Wall is not a true man.” I was surprised to find that it really IS a climb and you get amazing views. It also took our UNESCO World Heritage Site total on this trip to a respectable 30 – hey, only another 820 to go! Seeing the Wall stretch into the distance after only glimpses from the train in Datong and in the hazy mountains behind the Summer Palace made it very worthwhile.