2013 Euro Vacation: November 2013

Beijing- the last leg of the journey

The train trip from UB south through the Gobi Desert and into China provided a good view of the dry Mongolian landscape, camels and some nice sunset scenes (see previous post for photos).

After experiencing hours of delays crossing from Russia into Mongolia we had expected a lengthy delay on each side of the Mongolia-China border, but got a shock when looking at the timetable and discovered that the wait on the Chinese side was about 4 hours! At first we assumed this must be due to excessive customs bureaucracy, but it transpires that it’s because they have to swap the entire wheel sets on each carriage, as the Chinese run a narrower gauge track. The train is split into about 4 sections, then each bit is shunted into a huge shed, where each carriage is jacked up, the Mongolian wheels are all removed and new sets are attached. The process was actually quite slick, but due to the size of the train, it takes a while to complete.

The train runs through farmland in China and down a river valley which provided some great scenery, although visibility was hampered by smog closer to Beijing. There was a lot of corn being harvested, with much of the work still being done by people and donkeys, rather than machines.

Fortunately we had remembered to get the name of our hotel in Chinese characters, so that on arrival in Beijing the taxi driver had no trouble finding the place, and no trouble charging us about quadruple the normal price, but we were happy to get there. The Red Wall Garden Hotel Shijia was one we picked based on Trip Advisor reports, and it was excellent. Our room was great, the food in their little restaurant was good, and there were some other nice restaurants within a short walk. Also it’s within easy walking distance to the Forbidden City, Wangfujing shopping and the Dengshikou subway station.

We managed to visit the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square (fortunately before the recent terrorist incident). The Forbidden City is much bigger than I had envisaged and as it was the weekend, full of locals as well as foreign tourists. We went to a famous Peking Duck restaurant , the Li Qun, which was hard to find and was so busy that it was a bit of a disappointment. An amazingly picturesque place, it had photos on the walls of famous visitors including Al Gore and the Ambassadors of seemingly every western country, but I reckon I’ve had better duck at the Flower Drum in Melbourne. It was a fun experience anyway, and the duck was pretty good.

We visited the Great Wall at Mutianyu and it certainly did not disappoint. An amazing construction and deserving of every superlative written about it. The wall has very steep steps up to the watchtowers to tax the legs, but we mitigated the strain by catching the cable car up and down, rather than slogging up the hill from the village.

On Sunday I decided to visit Olympic Park via the subway, to see the Bird’s Nest stadium. About half the population of Beijing seemed to have had the same notion, so the trains were very busy, but for all that still worked very efficiently, with very modern station facilities on the Olympic line (much more like Singapore than London!).

We visited the Summer Palace on Tuesday, on the grounds that this is the quietest day of the week for visitors – all I can say is that it must be absolutely frenetic on a busy day. The grounds are huge and it would be easy to spend days exploring it. We contented ourselves with a few hours of walking and a boat ride across the lake.

The day for starting home arrived – Malaysian Airlines via KL to Perth. This gave us our first experience of the massive and very efficient Terminal 3 at Beijing Airport, built for the Olympics on 2008. This huge building was completed, from design to operation, in less time than it took just to receive and consider public interest submissions for Terminal 5 at Heathrow – the benefits of having a system of government which doesn't have to worry too much about public opinion.

The homeward trip was uneventful, and after getting back to Subiaco around 1:30 AM, a big slug of duty free ensured a sound night’s sleep.

It’s good to be home!