Trevor & Jonathans Cruise & Trip to the Far East and Australia 2016

Day 48 - Sunday June 26th 2016 - Beijing, China

So the alarm went off at 06:45 and we were pretty good and getting up and getting ready to go. We had told Randy to pick us up at 08:15 but we knew we would be ready for 08:00 which was the time he really wanted to be on the road by. We had a quick breakfast with Trevor going for the Chinese noodle option, Jonathan stuck with the toast and croissants!

Our first stop of the day was to be the former Olympic village, mainly the birds nest stadium as it is called and the water cube. These were the very iconic buildings from when Beijing hosted the games in 2008 prior to them coming to London and on the television they had always looked incredible.

The sad thing when we got to the Olympic park was how deserted it looked apart from the few tourists that had come out to look at these architectural marvels. There were a few roller bladers going up and down the huge pedestrian walkway area but frankly it did not feel like China had a use for these buildings anymore. Jonathan was accosted by a few Chinese men that

wanted a picture with a westerner!Randy explained that Beijing is full of really large stadiums and that in all honesty the birdcage had not been used since the Olympics. The water cube was though, it’s now a public swimming bath, still with utterly amazing outer shell made of some king of scientific polymer coating that can change any colour.

The Olympics were always meant to drive regeneration and bring prosperity to an area, that’s how they pick the cities that they give the games too but somehow that just does not seem to have translated in Beijing. To be fair we felt the same way when we went to the Olympic part on the outskirts of Sydney in Australia some years ago but China built so well the stadium is a thing of real beauty and the bird cage itself signifies family, being together, it’s such a clever design.

We left the Olympic site with some sadness as it just felt such a waste.

Our next stop of the day would take us along the motorways and out of the city of Beijing, into the green mountainous area that surrounds the city. We were off to the great wall of China, probably the most iconic structure in the whole of the country and we pinched ourselves that we were going to be able to say that we had walked along it, seen it with our own eyes, how lucky we are!

The great wall really is like a serpent cutting across the landscape. It undulates with the flow of the ground on which it is perched, along mountain ridge lines, across waterways and stretches a s far as your eye will allow you to see and then it goes further than that! The Chinese say it is like a dragon, protecting them from invaders of old.

Our way to the wall involved a climb! Now when I say climb we are talking in excess of, well let’s just say the steps were endless, steep and endless, this was not going to be easy at all!

To make matters worse the steps all had a different drop some shallow but some 30 cm high so it really was more like climbing and when you had managed to climb 100 or so of these gigantic step and realised there were still hundreds to go it did become a little soul destroying.

The goal was to at least make it to the the first watch tower. The wall is broken up into segments with a watch tower in-between each complete with castle battlements for firing at the enemy with cannons and guns. The steps take no prisoners and we both struggled as did every other single person attempting to tick that box and say that they walked the wall.

We made it to the first watch tower and Trev was done. It was scorching hot and he just could not take the ever changing height of all the individual steps, it was playing havoc with his knee and as the wall went higher up the mountain side the steps just got steeper and steeper, more irregular and more treacherous. Jonathan braved another six sections between watchtowers climbing to the peak of the mountain. You could only really take the views in when you stopped as when you were climbing up you had to concentrate on each individual step height so much to make sure you made no mis-footing. Once at the top you still could not really experience the scale of the wall as it twisted and turned all over the place not letting you see a long length out in front of you.

Coming down the steps in some ways was worse than climbing up them. We had managed to get to the wall before all the crowds so it had been relatively empty as we made our ascent but now it was a different story. The wall was getting busy and you couldn’t get near the handrail to steady yourself. People were stopping on the steps everywhere, trying to get their breath back, trying to find the energy to carry on. I really can’t communicate here just how difficult it really was.

I met back up with Trevor at the bottom of the stairs about an hour later and he was not happy at all. He had really hurt his knee and was limping around the place in pain. I managed to get some ice for him to put on the leg to try and bring any swelling down but he was also so angry that this had happened at all. The wall was to be a highlight of our trip to China and he really didn’t get to experience that much of it and what he did see was just a steep never ending staircase hat looked like it was going straight to heaven.

With this is mind when we got back to our tour guide we asked to be taken to another access point of the wall so that we could try again. We knew that you could access the wall via a cable car and this would make it so much easier for Trev to be able to see it. The guide was great and off we drove for another half an hour to the access point with the cable car. Unfortunately as we were going through the turnstiles to access the cable car Trev was shoved from behind by an over excited Chinese tourist and he hit the deck, his knee giving way again. He managed to keep it together and we proceed up the steps very slowly to the cable car that would take us to the mountain ridge to see the wall.

In an every cloud has a silver lining theme we were actually really lucky to see the all from here as well. The perspective was completely different as from here you could really see it snake around the place, up and down, left and right almost coming back on itself. The down side of that though was that this area of the wall was much busier so both good and bad points but at least got to stand right at the top of the wall, something we had both come to China to complete and now we had.

It truly is a marvel the wall. When you stand there and look at the sheer workmanship that is must have taken to complete its quite amazing that it was ever built at all. Our guide told us that over a million people had died in its construction and to be honest that comes as no surprise. In many ways it is the largest monument to the strength of the Chinese people in the whole of China.

After the wall our next planned visit was to be the Tombs of the Ming Dynasty but in another twist of the you’re on a guided tour knife we ended up on route to a jade factory with the promise of lunch afterwards.

We were led through into a giant factory with a few machine operators making sculptures and design in the precious stone that to China is as precious as a diamond. Watching some of the incredible intricate sculptures and objects made by hand was truly amazing but this stuff is heavy and it certainly does not come cheap so no matter how hard our personal guide Andy tried to get us to part with some Yen it was just never going to happen.

After perusing the gift shop for some time and realising that we were not going to buy we were taken upstairs for our much needed lunch. Randy had told them again about our love for spicy food and we were once again served a four course lunch menu. We started with a soup which we would both swear was tinned tomato soup with bits of beef put in it and a few onions (it actually was better than yesterday’s offering though). For the two main courses we had vegetables and chillies with pork and chicken again although the meat portions were quite scarce. We are not complaining though as again, it was actually very tasty indeed all washed down with some more watermelon and some chocolate spring rolls type thing. We though they were spring rolls at first but one bite in and a bit of broccoli and it was confirmed that this was definitely meant for a sweet.

From the jade factory and lunch we got back in the car and headed another half an hour or so down to the road to what would be the last stop on the tour The Tombs of Ming.

So we are beck to the Ming dynasty, one of the families that gave birth to the emperors that ruled over China. We know the Chinese Ming from programs like Antiques Roadshow where hopeful people would bring along a vase hoping that the valuers would tell them that it was from the Ming era (time when the Ming family were in rule) and be worth a fortune. This was the family burial site and what they in turn called an underground palace.

You walked through the three gates to get to the underground palace entrance all set in beautiful pine trees with marble pathways.

We were going to see the palace of the third Ming emperor and his two wives. He had two empresses as his first wife had died before him hence he got remarried and was buried with both wives. To get to the room where the coffins were to be found you had to descent into the ground about seven floors down, truly a marvel of Chinese ancient engineering. Each of the subsequent emperor all had a palace on site as part of the Ming grounds but this is the only one that is restored and the public can fully access.

Once underground you are taken into the first room where a large raised platform stood, this is where the body would have waited to be put into the coffin. In the next room of complex arches and domes were the three white thrones, one for the emperor and the other two for each of the empresses. The colour white is significant here as it symbolises peace and rest not like the red of the living palaces. This again leads to another room where you find the gigantic red lacquered wood coffins of the two empresses and the emperor himself. Bu the side of these large red boxes were smaller boxes full of treasures from their lives just like they did in burying the old kings and queens of ancient Egypt. The biggest marvel though was the building and the construction. In some ways it felt very much like a nuclear war bunker but built out of finer materials. The amazing thing of course is that they could build it at all at that it could stand this length of time still not damp and still not sinking or decayed.

And that was that, the end of our guided tours of Beijing and some of its history, we drove back into Beijing dropping Randy off in the middle of a roundabout somewhere right on the real outskirts of the city. Mr Pound drove us in the rest of the way, muttering into his mobile phone as he does. Honestly the sounds that come out of their mouths don’t always sound like a language. More like a series of grunts and moans, there’s no clear diction or anything.

Mr. Pound dropped us off at the hotel and after dropping off all our stuff we headed off to a local coffee shop to try and find some faster internet (and a coffee, Jonathan has had a headache all afternoon and is sure it’s due to a severe lack of decent caffeine). We have had a real problem finding decent internet since Hong Kong, by that I mean fast enough internet to update all the photos for the blog pages. Unfortunately, the cafes internet did not cut the mustard either but it was faster than the speeds we were getting on the free hotel Wi-Fi.

Now we had the same problem as yesterday in that we were not that hungry having eaten another massive Chinese lunch but we figured we should eat something and just like yesterday we really did not fancy another rice or noodle dish so where did we end up?

Well let’s just say that it’s been a while, so long that I can’t actually remember when the last time was that we ate in a Pizza Hut but tonight we did. We only ordered a medium pizza to share and two glasses of wine before making our way back to the hotel again and our room.

The washing had arrived a day early and as we were running out of clothes I needed to do some ironing again. It was another ironing board from hell unfortunately, fit for dwarves as Jonathan tried to get the multiple creases out of the clothes that had been so tightly packed by the laundry they were in need of some serious steam. Of course hotel irons are not known for their quality either and this one was no exception to the rule, after pressing about eight items he just gave up it wasn’t worth all the effort going in. We have another hotel in three nights so hopefully that will be better.

The rest of the evening was spent with Trev desperately trying to sort out the photos that keep mounting up. To give you some idea we must have taken some two hundred today along with our visit to the great wall, it’s hard not to just click away at all the stuff you know you will probably never see again in your life time. A the ironing Jonathan chilled in front of the iPad with a glass of wine and homeland on the iPad.

Tomorrow is our last day in Beijing and we are on our own, not sure what we are doing with the day just yet but its nice to know that there will be no alarm call, as after that things get manic for a time again with Planes, Trains and Automobiles looming…oh and a terracotta army!