Beijing

歡迎來到北京 (Welcome to Beijing)

Temples, Pandas, Palaces and Peking Duck

15/09/2017: Day One

We are free of the train! We arrived in Beijing around lunch time today after travelling through the beautiful countryside of Northern China from Mongolia. While I have truly enjoyed my time on the train, and it has been a life changing experience, I am looking forward to not being on a train for a while. After being collected by our Beijing guide we made our way to the 365 Inn, our hostel where we would be staying for the last couple of nights of the trip. The Hostel is super well located, near both a shopping Houtong on Qianmen Street and Tiananmen Square.

After getting checked in our first stop was the Forbidden City. We were super fortunate that we managed to go to the Forbidden City in the afternoon without pre-booking tickets, but it is advisable to pre-book. They only let through a certain number of tourists a day so if you haven’t pre-booked you may be out of luck. The Forbidden City is incredible. The scale of things in China is just something else. We were in Beijing the week before Golden Week. Golden Week is a national week off in China and results in the busiest time of year for Beijing. Because of this when we were there they were touching up all the paint work on places like the Forbidden City to make it more colourful. The good thing about the Forbidden City is that, much like many Chinese monuments, it is perfectly symmetrical so you only have to walk around half and can save a bit of time.

After the Forbidden City we headed to the Drum and Bell towers to the North of the Forbidden City and the oldest Houtong in China. Dating from the Ming Dynasty these buildings are protected and are some of the most desirable properties in Beijing despite their size and lack of modern amenities. Part of this is the prestige of living in this area of Beijing and the other part is that these houses are privately owned and can be passed from generation to generation, unlike the rest of Beijing which is on long term lease from the government. We went on a Rickshaw ride through the Houtong that also let us go into one of the houses. It is worth shopping locally for the Rickshaw rides as it can be very expensive to book from overseas compared to what you pay if you book when you arrive in Beijing.

We then jumped on the underground and headed to the modern and quite touristy Ya’er Houtong on the man-made Houhai lake nearby where there was lots of shopping and snacks to be had. We tried stinky tofu, which is a bit like blue cheese in tofu version. It is quite a pretty part of town to walk around with the lake and lots of cute stores. The underground is also very easy to navigate. When buying a ticket you put in your start point and destination and are issued a ticket. The machines can be put into English and the maps inside the trains are both in Chinese characters and western alphabet so that you can navigate.

Our last stop of the day was a local hotel where we had a dumpling cooking class and got to cook our own dinner. It was a lot of fun learning how to make the dumplings, and they tasted all the better having made them ourselves.

15/09/2017: Day Two

Today Louise and I have our own thing booked for the morning, we are heading off on a private tour of the Beijing Zoo Panda House and the Summer Palace. Rightly thinking that we would be quite tired by the time we arrived in Beijing we pre-booked a couple of tours for our time here to make sure we saw all the things we wanted to. We were picked up in the morning by our guide, up until this point I thought it was a group tour so it was quite a nice surprise to find out that we had a private guide, driver and car for the morning.

First stop was the Panda House at Beijing Zoo. Louise and I were completely in love with the Pandas, and our guide was very nice and let us walk around a couple of times to see them all. We went very early in the morning which is the best thing to do because it fills up very fast as it is a popular family attraction.

Next we went to the Summer Palace. The Summer Palace is fascinating, as is the history of its patron the Empress Dowager Cixi. It is well worth getting a guide here to learn about the symbolism of different parts of the Palace and of Cixi’s history. For example, in most Palaces the statue of the Dragon (Emperor) is on the inside, closes to the door, and the statue of the Phoenix (Empress) is on the outside. At the Summer Palace this is reversed as Cixi viewed herself as more powerful than a man. We walked through the Long Corridor, which is made of water colour paintings and is thus in a constant state of being restored, and then caught one of the dragon boats back to the entrance.

After our tour we were dropped back to the hostel where we met up with our guide and Rachael again for the afternoon. The plan for the afternoon was to go to the Temple of Heaven and then find Peking Duck for dinner.

The Temple of Heaven was so peaceful, we were pushing it for time so didn’t get to walk through a lot of the gardens in order to see all three temples so it would be nice to go back there and have a bit more time exploring. The three temples were all unique and all had their own symbolism and purpose. Again, it’s definitely advisable to get an audio guide or a tour here so you don’t miss out on the details. The Temple was built in the Ming Dynasty and was used by the Emperor on the winter solstice to pray for a good harvest.

After the Temple of we went to the government owned tea house, the Yipin Gudao Tea House. We tried about 5 teas in a tea ceremony that was very pleasant after a day of walking. To finish off the night we went to a Peking Duck restaurant that was a favourite of our guide. If you want good Peking Duck, head away from the tourist hot spots and go where the locals go. It was delicious!

So that was our day and a half around Beijing, we hit most of the major hot spots and even a couple of extras. Tomorrow we head to the Great Wall before we fly home to NZ tomorrow night!