Ni Hao from Beijing!

After a three hour delay at Sydney Airport I didn't arrive in Beijing until 11pm. Trains were closed for the evening so I forced my way through the crowds to the front of the airport, skipped the cabs and stood in line for a 16Y bus ticket from a woman who would not stop screaming. The bus took me part of the way into the city. After some difficulties I managed to hail down a taxi to take me the rest of the way to the hotel. Due to a booking problem I was upgraded for the first night to a deluxe room on the 10th floor. Since it was dark and I was exhausted I didn’t see much of Beijing on Friday night. I woke up the next morning with sunlight bursting through the curtains and the amplified sound of Mandarin coming from a bus megaphone outside. I opened the curtains, perched on the windowpane and sipped at my morning tea as I tried to take in the expanse of Beijing, from the skyscrapers down to the traditional slate rooftops, finally down to the street level populated by hundreds of people on bicycles.

I left the hotel and shot out onto the streets of Beijing armed with a powerful arsenal of two words in mandarin, hello and thank you (I would later learn the words 'no thank you' - equally powerful). First on my travel itinerary was Tienanmen Square and the Forbidden City. I walked into the city feeling like a millionaire, I picked up a can of coke for 15 pence and caught the metro into the centre for around 7 pence. After an hour of getting my bearings and having proudly avoided being scammed by two arts students who wanted to 'practice their English' but were actually trying to lead me to an exhibition of overpriced art I walked into a small park that would lead me to the Forbidden City. As I walked through the park gate two girls started talking to me. At first they seemed very nice and interested in practicing their English and on our way to the Forbidden City we stopped by a tiny tea house. I had heard of Chinese Tea scams, the idea being to lead an unsuspecting tourist into an expensive tea house and ditch them with a staggering bill (I spoke to someone recently who had lost 4000Y that way – about £300) but even so it happened fast, one second we were happily chatting away and the next they ducked through a door in a tiny alleyway and I found myself sitting in a small wood-paneled room face-to-face with someone about to perform a tea ceremony. As the three of them chattered to each other in Mandarin I was alarmed to see tea being poured before me and I felt an immediate and uncomfortable sinking feeling. I looked up at the prices on the wall – 30Y per cup per person, so 3 x people, 10 x types of tea to taste, 100Y hire for the room, 10Y for each plate of fruit – I had to get out of there fast. I asked them to stop pouring tea but they were already pouring a second cup, my eyes rolled around the tiny room, the entrance was firmly closed - not good… Panicked I knocked on the door for the bill – it had already totaled 400Y in the space of two minutes. The second girl asked if I would pay for the three of us. I lied and said that I'd left the hotel with only a few hundred yuan. They squirmed as the woman doing the tea ceremony sat watching patiently. Next they said they would need to go visit their Grandmother to pick up some cash. Hell no I thought, so I asked one of them to stay. After that they just agreed to split the bill three ways and I made it out at relatively small cost to my wallet, but at huge cost to my pride.

I spent the next hour or so wandering around Tienanmen Square before entering the Forbidden City. The complex of temples stretched on for a mile and it was fantastic to see, but I spent much of my time annoyed at myself for walking straight into a tea scam. After 6 hours I finally gave in trying to see every square inch of the Forbidden City and decided to make my way back to the hotel.

The next morning I moved to the Peking Downtown Backpackers Hostel located in a winning location halfway along a lively hutong in the old part of the city. There are 360 hutong in total in Beijing and together they are home to many of the 17 million inhabitants of this vast city. Hutong are ancient and often crumbling alleyways that crisscross the city and are the bustling heart of Beijing. Later on Sunday I took two trains and a bus to reach the Summer Palace. Occasionally a local would start a conversation with me, though feeling wary of being scammed again I was a little hesitant to chat. But after a while I realised that outside the main tourist areas people were genuinely interested in just chatting. The Summer Palace was just jaw dropping, possibly the most beautiful place I've ever visited - a tower of palaces overlooking a serene lake crossed by a 17-arch bridge.

On Monday I spent the day walking a 10km stretch of the Great Wall of China that took me through 30 wall towers from Jinshanling to Simatai. At the end of the 4-hour walk I could either make my way on foot to the bus or take a zip cable down to the bottom. The other three backpackers I was trekking with decided to take the cable so I followed. They hooked a small harness around my legs and hooked that to the cable, then just like that pushed me off the cliff, 200ft to the bottom of the gorge! For the first 10 seconds I felt I had made a gross error in judgment, but it was a fantastic way over the lake. On Monday night six of us decided it was time to try Beijing's most famous dish – Peking duck! So we reserved a table at one of the city's top restaurants, the entrance of which was separated from the kitchen by a glass wall that allowed us to peer in at a line of chefs as they prepared the ducks. The starter consisted of broccoli and other mixed vegetables followed by a duck tongue soup that was served inside an orange. A chef then prepared the duck itself at a small wooden bench in front of our table, letting us observe his cutting technique. After that the duck's head was severed and cleaved in two, with the two halves arranged side-by-side on a separate dish so that we could enjoy the delicacy that is the duck's brain.

On Tuesday we hired bicycles and went to the Olympic Park to see the Bird's Nest Stadium. Riding through the small crowded streets of Beijing is a great way to see the city. You can read in a book that there are 1.3 billion people in China as many times as you like but until you're in the thick of it you cannot appreciate what that actually means, and it is pretty crazy.


The Forbidden City (and Chairman who?)


The Summer Palace. Just awesome.


Conquering the Great Wall was easier than jumping off that cliff.


The Birds Nest. Someone competing in the Coca-Cola bottle relay during the games.


Me being arrested by the Beijing Olympic mascots for illegally running on the sports track.