Lee and Clare, The road home

The Great Wall and More

2^nd November 2003

Our Trans-Siberian mission is now over. We have arrived in Beijing, China 27 days after leaving Moscow, the start of the route. Actually to be exact we did the "Trans Mongolian" rather than the "Trans-Siberian" which goes from Moscow to Vladivostok, taking in only Russia. If we'd done our route without stopping (we made 5 stops) we could have done this journey in only 5 days.

We've been on the road now for 6 and a half weeks (3 months to go!) and are starting to feel a bit weary so today we checked ourselves into a nice hotel with a bathroom with a western toilet, a TV with 1 English channel and a window. We've spent the last 5 nights in a youth hostel, 4 floors underground and every night they pump in some weird gas that makes us feel really wasted when we wake up. There are only squat toilets. Squat toilets are okay in train stations and dodgy restaurants, they're expected, but not fun in the middle of the night when you need to make a run for it down the long hospital type corridors in a daze and get yourself positioned in time. (Let's just say that the digestion problems of Mongolia caused by eating nothing but meat, fat and flour have now turned around on us with the introduction of Chinese food).

Our last night in Mongolia we went out to a couple of nightclubs with a couple of dudes from our hostel (very interesting guys, one who'd done VSO in Mongolia for 2 years and is now working for the UN Development fund and another who was cycling around the world with a budget of about $100US a month). We bought vodka by the bottle and head banged with all the young'uns on the dance floor and had a hysterical time. We got the cheapest vodka on the menu ($5US a bottle), should've learnt from Turkish and Egyptian experiences that cheap Vodka isn't the best for bellies (or should we say Wodka/Votka). Moved to a nightclub that ended up having a floor show that included an electrical guitar player, a couple of singers and a stripper, she was pretty good on that pole! Good night, bummer we had to get up at 6.30 for our train on to China.

We feel like we've gone back in time, we can't believe how the weather can be so different after a 30 hour train ride. We've gone from winter back to later summer, with a bit of autumn in the air. On the train journey we saw yellow and orange leaves, but here in Beijing most things are still green and we're walking around in T-shirts, though it does get a bit chilly at nighttime.

Beijing is different to what we expected. The first day we marvelled at how clean everything was. We expected something dirty and smelly like Bangkok, but here there is not a bit of chewing gum or a cigarette butt on the ground in the city centre and everything seems very modern and quite westernised. The cars are all fairly new, no old clangers, but unfortunately there is still very very bad smog. Sometimes you can't see the apartment block across the road. We guess with a city with a population of 14 million it can't be avoided but man it's gross. We didn't see any smog on the day we arrived, as it was really windy.

The smog goes right out of the city too. Yesterday we went out to touch the Great Wall. Yes, we'd seen it from the train, but of course we had to touch it/walk on it too. Even as you near it, it's hard to pick it out through the smog - we're glad we were lucky enough to see it from our train. The section we went to is 110kms from the city centre. We chose this section as our guidebook said that it hadn't been "over-reconstructed" and wasn't too "kitch". Unfortunately we got involved in a bit of a scam in our attempts to get there that really p i ssed us off, but we made it there eventually. There was a cable car to take you up to the top, but we decided to be tough and walk up the wall. We went up 5 towers, and it took us about an hour and a half (would've been shorter but I've had a dodgy stomach so feeling a bit of a weakling). Didn't quite make it to where the cable car goes up to the 12th tower! Would've been dead by then. The stairs were sooo steep, some of them were 70 degrees and hard work. There's also a good bit of "SIR, POSTCARD!!" in your ear as you walk up.

The scam: To cut a long story short a minibus from Beijing was supposed to take us half way to the wall and drop us at a bus station where we could get on another minibus the rest of the way. But it dropped us short of the bus station and bundled us into what we thought was the correct minibus. We thought it was a bit strange and specified before we got in that it would cost 10 yuan each which the driver agreed to. When we got there he said it would be 100 yuan ($12US). Things got a bit heated, as this was a complete rip off. Luckily there was a Chinese lady there who could translate for us and we got it sorted. We were really p is sed off as it was obvious that the lady on the first bus pushed us out there on purpose into the second van. Grrrr!

We've also visited the Forbidden City, which was where all the emperors of China lived during the Ming and Qing Dynasties for 500 years. It's made pretty much all of wood and has been burnt to the ground about 4 times and rebuilt to its original architecture. Big tourist attraction for the Chinese, it was streaming with people. Would like to know how many photos were taken in there that day.

The Forbidden City is just over from Tiananmen Square, most famous in the west as being where a whole load of democracy protestors were mown down with bullets (can't remember the year!). Lots of people fly kites there these days (and try to sell them to you of course!). We liked hangin' out there, soaking up the atmosphere and a few fumes.

Also to the Summer Palace, a bit out of the city, which really was a huge example of a Chinese garden and good for a bit of R & R even though it's built over a big hill. There were a few school groups there who seemed more excited to see us than the palace, they would come and sit on the wall along from us and their friend would take a photo, but you could tell that the camera was pointing at us. So we just moved up next to them and smiled widely, and then took photos with our own camera! Other teenagers would come up to us and practice their English, which was quite funny for us. When Chinese people talk to us they ALWAYS ask the same questions, like that's all they learn in English classes. Hello, how are you, where do you come from, how long have you been in China, do you like it here (and sometimes do you want to visit my art gallery/buy postcard/buy Chairman Mao book/buy kite).

We were sad enough to go and have a look at another dead dude. Now if we thought visiting Lenin's tomb in Moscow was weird, then the Mao one here in Beijing is totally bizarre. You line up with thousands of Chinese people who buy plastic flowers from a vendor at the front. Just inside the building there's a big statue of him and they put their plastic flowers there in front of him and bow (flowers get rounded up after and put back on the stall at the front). Then you walk through and see his body, with his face lit up like a lamp. As you file out there's a long row of souvenir shops selling tacky Chairman Mao paraphernalia. Now we're not too up with Chinese history (but trying to learn as we go!) but we do know that that man was responsible for some pretty horrendous stuff and here he is having grown adults in business suits bowing to his statue. Weird experience.

Anyway, we're a bit more on the tourist track now, with big tourist attractions to see, which is making for a bit of a change for us as we've been a bit off the beaten track for a while. There are more travellers around and we've found we're not quite sure how to communicate in English anymore as it's not very often that we have real conversations with anyone but each other!

Views on China so far. It's very different in many ways to the countries we have come through up till now. The main thing (unfortunately) is that we are finding it quite frustrating that it seems to us that when Chinese people see foreigners they see $$$. We've come across hawkers in many countries of course, but here in China it just seems different and we don't know why? Some of them never seem to give up, and rickshaws can follow you all the way down the road, yelling "HELLO! HELLO!" (tuk tuk drivers do that in Thailand too, so don't know why it's so much more annoying here??).

So, our scam experience yesterday has made us very wary of Chinese people, which we know is really not fair at this early stage. We think that the culture here is so different after Europe and Russia. For example, this morning I slipped over in the hostel and fell on my ass and the 2 staff members that were mopping the shiny floor with lots of water laughed and then disappeared. I guess there's lots of things that we'll have to get used to here, even though we'll never understand!

Anyway, we're worried that this emails sounds negative, which we don't mean it to, we're still having a great time, there are just lots of really new things to take in with our arrival in this huge country with a population of over 1.2 billion. Don't know why we're surprised! Not least that (obviously) everything is written in Chinese, no chance of understanding that!

This is a really long email so we'll leave it at that, except to say that we are off to celebrate our last night in Beijing with some Peking Duck. Oh and that tomorrow we are going to Pingyao for a night and then to Xi'an where we'll see the Army of Teracotta Warriors. Cool.