Wandergaels: Beijing (China)

We travelled the 1,300 km from Shanghai to Beijing on a high-speed ‘bullet’ train, which took around five and a half hours altogether including a few stops along the way. The highest speed was around 300 km/hour. This gave us our first chance to see some of the Chinese countryside with its large areas of paddy fields and rolling mountain ranges all the while in spacious seats with plenty of precious legroom!

We travelled from the train station in Beijing to our hostel area on the metro (which is an interesting experience in itself, especially around rush hour when elbow space is at a premium). After a bit of an impromptu on-foot search through some of the Beijing backstreets, we eventually arrived at the hostel hot, sweaty, and with our tongues hanging out for some cold beer.

Public bus (spot Aisling)

On our first day in Beijing (and considering that we were going to see most of the other main Beijing attractions in the next few days as part of an organised tour), we decided to pay a visit to the National Museum of China. This was a huge new building reminiscent of an airport hangar, and was full of historic relics and sculptures (including some by Spanish artist Salvador Dali). That evening we visited the Beijing night market, where shouting food stall merchants offer fruit and meats of all descriptions (as well as different species of snakes and insects, some of which are still wiggling their legs right up until they’re thrown onto the pan). These delicacies seemed to be generally cooked in oil or sugar and mainly on thin wooden skewers. We jumped in at the shallow end and could only manage to try the deep-fried banana.
On day two, we visited Beijing Zoo, which of course included a visit to the panda house (at the request of Aisling). Later in the day we started our 15-day ‘China Adventure’ group tour. We started with an evening meeting with the 12 other people in our group and a general introduction to the tour by our guide. The next morning, we (along with the rest of the group) visited Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, both of which are located in the centre of the city. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to visit Chairman Mao’s mausoleum, which is also located beside the Square, but the trip to the Forbidden City (the wall-surrounded home of former Chinese emperors) gave us an insight into the lives of these emperors (and their many concubines). We also did a group cycle around some of the backstreets of Beijing, which allowed us to see places we wouldn’t otherwise have seen, like literally into some local peoples’ back gardens.

Just like Shanghai (and Singapore), the number of people in Beijing is a bit staggering (21.5 million on last count), so it's hard to find anywhere that isn't overrun with people. Unlike Shanghai, Beijing has more than a couple of tourist attractions on offer but surprisingly there didn't seem to be many other foreigners around any of the places we visited. Similar to in Shanghai, this general lack of other tourists resulted in lots of Chinese people taking pictures of us and staring at us as we walked around, which our guide informed us was probably due to the fact that we were likely the first westerners they had ever seen in the flesh.