hillgurney on tour: China Part 1 - Beijing and Pingyao

We arrived in China on 8th April and had a wonderful but very tiring month travelling from Beijing in the north to Nanning in the south. As we can't get Blogspot in China we've not been able to update the blog for a month but now we're in Vietnam. We're here for 2 weeks and then we'll be heading back to China for another month of exploring this enormous county.

We arrived at midnight in Beijing and had to queue for about an hour just to get a taxi. Luckily we met a Mandarin-speaking and English-speaking lady from Brazil who's apartment was close to our hotel, so we shared a taxi with her and she gave the driver directions. The following day we woke up to a very grey, polluted Beijing and went off exploring. We had 6 nights in Beijing and Nic spent his 40th birthday here. We found the people to be very friendly and we were given lots of help by the English-speaking Chinese people that we met.

We were worried about the food in China but it was easy to find really simple, cheap and tasty food but you can also get goose intestines and chicken' feet if you want them!

There are public toilets all over the place, which means that there is often an unpleasant urine smell. We found out that many people do not have houses with their own toilet, which is why there are so many public toilets.

Whilst we were in Beijing we visited Tiananmen Square, the world's largest public square. We also went to the Forbidden City, which is enormous and packed with lots of very boisterous, excited Chinese tourist that enjoy pushing and shoving. Many of the women were very over dressed and wore very very high heels.

One of the highlights was the great wall of china, where we did a 6km walk along the wall, setting off in Jinshanling. We had a beautiful sunny day and it was great to get out of the polluted city. The history of the wall is mind-boggling and the mountain views were spectacular.

We also visited the Olympic park, the Temple of Heaven and the Lama Temple, a beautiful Tibetan Buddhist temple.

Some of the many soldiers at Tiananmen Square

I think they may need some more CCTV!

Photo of Chairman Mao at the Entrance to the Forbidden City

Typical Chinese tourist at the Forbidden City

The stunning Great Wall of China:

Chilling with a monk at the Lama Temple

The famous Bird's Nest

The equally famous Cube

Temple of Heaven

Next we headed to Pingyao on our first over night sleeper train. We got a taxi through the insane Beijing traffic to the train station and we couldn't believe the size of it; it was more like an airport. We had booked hard sleepers and had middle bunks opposite each other. We set off at 7am and arrived in Pingyao at 7.30 am; there was alot of snoring and we felt pretty tired but Pingyao turned out to be a very relaxing place and it was a relief to be out of Beijing. We spent 2 nights here and then got another sleeper train to Xian.

Pingyao is China's best-preserved ancient walled town and it's very pretty. There are lots of temples and buildings to visit and you can walk around the top of the walls. We also did a trip out to Wang's Family Courtyard, which is enormous and more like a castle. From the top of the walls we could see the still-occupied cave dwellings. Around 3 million people still live in caves in the Shanxi district. We also visited the Zhangbi Underground Castle, a 1400-year-old network of defence tunnels, and Zhangi Cun, an 800-year-old village above the tunnels.