Days 269 to 275 - Wed July 29 to Tue Aug 4 - Beijing

Most of the trip, we haven't had a real schedule, but since we want to get a full 2 months in Russia, we actually have deadlines this month. On day 269 we close up shop in Huizhou, say a sad goodbye to Dre and Amelie and settle into Car 8, Top Bunks 9 & 10. We're a few days behind schedule - we should have arrived last Sunday but I caught a cold and refused to travel. We re-booked and had to sacrifice a few days from both Beijing and Russia to make it work - the only reason the timing is complicated is because a) there's paperwork to do for the Mongolian visa that takes a few working days to process and b) the Trans-Mongolian only leaves twice a week. We don't want to take any chances so we're trying to leave ourselves a bit of elbow room in our schedule.

We arrive in Beijing late on day 270 and book ourselves into the lovely and affordable Hai Inn in the Hu Tong alleys near the Lama Temple in the north east part of the center. Our wanderings let us stumble across a great place on our first night that serves Beijing Duck, and we go back almost every night afterward for dinner. On one of those evenings, Pierre gets inspired by a dab of plum sauce on his plate and with the help of a toothpick, paints it into a lovely likeness of a cow. If it becomes art, is it still "playing with your food"? The restaurant makes a lot of money off of us that week - when we aren't splurging there on the lovely duck, we're enjoying our last tastes of mutton soup, pickled garlic heads and chicken pockets at the Xi'An-style restaurant at the end of our street. We already miss Chinese food and we haven't even left yet.

We take care of paperwork - pick up our Trans-Siberian tickets and set up our Mongolian visas. Day 272 finds us on a small group tour to the Great Wall - we don't want to take a chance on waiting and possibly running out of time or good weather. The weather is not on our side - we end up with a foggy overcast day.

Actually, correction: the weather is not on Pierre's side. He wants to take pictures and the weather's cramping his style. I, on the other hand, love the fog and love not having the sun beat down on me as we make the 10 km trek from Jinshanling to Simatai. The wall is not too crowded but it is being fixed, so there are workers periodically, and the sections of wall that used to be more treacherous are a lot more tourist friendly. Pierre has been on this trek before: in a nutshell, what the route has gained in safety and health of the wall it has lost in terms of remoteness and atmosphere. A couple of vendors walk half of the wall with us, point out where the Mongolians (that the wall was meant to keep out) would have lived, tell us about their own village and their children, and stop with us when we have a short fruit and water break. At the halfway point they have to turn back, and the hard sell begins - they work on us awhile to buy some of the books or t-shirts they're carrying. We buy some postcards and continue on. The bus ride is an hour shorter on the way home than it was on the way there (3 hours, as opposed to 4). We go for duck when we get home.

On day 273 we visit the Lama Temple nearby, which Pierre has seen before. It's a short visit - we're getting a little templed out. However, it is beautiful. It's the second biggest Tibetan Buddhist temple in the country, and the largest outside of Tibet itself. It also boasts a massive Buddha sculpture carved out of a single trunk of sandalwood. Tourists aren't allowed to take pictures of the sculpture, but you can find them online and can get them from postcards. At 26 m in height, it is quite impressive. At one of the little market stalls there is also an award-winning carver of "chops", traditional stone signature stamps. We decide to get one as one of the few souvenirs we will bring them home from China.

Beijing is staggeringly polluted - this is the only clear day we have in the city, due to the downpour of the previous night; one day of storm clears up the air for a day and you can see blue sky, but by the end of the second day after the storm the smog and dust visibly slowly lower from the sky until everything further than a street or two away is hazy and blurry from the knees up.

Our second visit of the day is to the Temple of Heaven and its surrounding park. The primary pavilion is famous for its elaborate woodwork and architecture and a little further down the main Causeway is the whispering wall where you can whisper on one side of a curved sandstone wall and have a listener understand you on its other end, 180° across from you. Unfortunately, most likely due to obnoxious amounts of tourists all trying this at the same time, the wall is sort of fenced off and you're not really supposed to approach it too closely, thus thwarting attempts to actually prove the theorem. We spend a bit more time walking around the park and head off to try and catch the sunset on the Forbidden City from the top of the hill of the Jin Shan park directly north of it. Pierre is hoping to catch the light of the only sunset we get to see in the city, but the smog is already settling back in and the light is good but not great. Still, several pictures are gotten, a nice time is had and the view is enjoyed.

The following day, We make it to the Forbidden City and walk around the grounds. Another superlative, The Forbidden City is the largest collection of preserved ancient wooden buildings in the world. Typical of the grandeur and excess of royalty, the place is stuffed wall-to-wall with awe-inspiring scale and relentless, lavish detail. You wouldn't want the Emperor to have boring roofing tile, now would you? It is beautiful, however, and no visit to Beijing is complete without seeing it. Even if you've seen it before, you probably didn't see it all and there is always going to be something that catches your eye again and makes you appreciate all the effort that went into creating this place. As a hilariously offensive T-shirt once put it: "Slavery, it gets [things] done." We walk through Tian An Men square, directly south of the Palace. This is the largest public square in the world (about 440,000 m²), as the PRC would have it no other way. To the south is the Qianmen (Chi-Ahn-Men) gate which used to be part of the old city walls, torn down in the heyday of the communist era in a frenzy of modernization. Somewhere around the middle is the mausoleum of Chairman Mao where you can queue in a line that usually spans I'd guess at least a kilometer (and three or four people wide) by snaking to and fro along the area of the square in order to get a glimpse of the embalmed chairman himself. Seeing as - 1) Pierre has done this once before, 2) it's a really hot day, 3) it's one of our priorities to go see another communist leader, Vladimir Lenin, in Moscow - we decide to skip this attraction this time around.

In other parts of Beijing, we do a bit of shopping and walking around, discover that the cool-sounding tour of the underground tunnels has been closed permanently, and that the national museum is closed on Mondays (but we catch it on Tuesday). We eat whatever treats we can find (street food is always the way to go), and walk through the narrow streets of the Hu Tongs around the Forbidden Palace (who knew we'd find delicious fish and chips tucked away down here). On day 275, we wrap things up, pack and get some final supplies for our train trip the next day.