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

Day 49 - Monday June 27th 2016 - Beijing, China

So we were home alone today and by that I mean no guide, no agenda and no place to be. Trev woke up not feeling too great, he felt a bit sickly and had a stomach ache so rather than dashing off to pound the streets of Beijing we took it all a bit easy at first but we certainly made up for it by the end of the day having clocked up some 20km by the end of our sightseeing.

We had breakfast down on the hotels ground floor. It’s always quite a simple affair for us, toast and croissants, safe stuff when your starting off on a day out, not that there looks like there is anything wrong with the food they are serving here. Like we said in an earlier blog, all the food preparation areas we have seen in Beijing look spotless so we have never had reason to worry or even question them.

After breakfast we went in search of decent caffeine again and went out a really funky coffee shop just round the corner that we had been to be for this time asking for the coffee to be served extra hot as it has always tasted

great but been served luke warm. Having the coffee and the use of the free Wi-Fi also gave us the opportunity to work out what we were going to try and do today and how we were going to get there! Our guide of the last two days (Randy) had told us that the subway (underground/metro) system here was really good and really cheap so we needed to study the maps a little to make sure we could get where we wanted to be.

With our research complete as best we could we headed for the nearest subway station and line five for the Lama temple. The fare for the two of us for a one-way ticket was a grand total of 60p so it’s great value and we were only travelling four stops up the line.

The only thing about using the subway system here is which exit to take as they don’t always mark the tourist points of interest on the guides. To access the subway all your bags have to go through a security scanner just like at airports but to be honest I’m not sure that any of the guards that are manning these things are paying that much attention. We saw many fast asleep at the screen so let’s just hope for the people of Beijing that the machine is doing all the work.

So like I said, our first stop was the Lama Temple. Obviously this temple is a Buddhist temple and named after the highest office in Buddhism the Lama. You have to see the irony in it to be honest with Chinas current relationship with Tibet and the Dallia Llama? You seriously would not think that they would allow such a temple to exist in the centre of Beijing would you. It turns out that in actual facts it is one of the oldest temples in the whole of Beijing and it was closed to the people for the best part of twenty years, obviously things have changed and you can now visit it for you £3.00 entry fee.

Now we both always feel awkward in places like this. It’s a real temple with real people with real beliefs praying to what they believe in and here we are along with hundreds of other tourists sticking our noses into a religion that we probably don’t understand, taking photos of things because they look interesting or colourful, there’s a real part of us that does not like that. The temple itself was almost identical to any of the other palaces and temples we have seen in the last two days in terms of the architecture, a central avenue, side colonnades, central places of worship and all of them are decorated in that Chinese fashion, al colourful, lots of red and gold, ceramic tiled roofs. What is very different are the alters and the sculptures of the Buddha’s and other protecting warriors guarding the Buddha himself. The complex also has a bell tower with a massive bell that would have been struck by a large log to the side to sound it. These bells are not like the bells of England with the clanger inside the bell, completely different.

Offerings or incense were burning everywhere but you did not get the sense of smell of it all as most of the alters were external so the smell was blown into the wind.

We were being honest with ourselves when we both admitted that we were both suffering from a bit of temple fatigue, we have suffered this before in Thailand. Sometimes the temples as beautiful as they are start to roll into one as they do have so many similarities and this was starting to happen here. We had seen so much on the last two days that and other Chinese place was starting to look like a temple to look like, well anything of historical importance so it was time to change tack and go and look at something completely different.

So it was back on the subway, a change of line and a visit to the Bell and Drum Towers. These stand on the same straight line as all the other important buildings that can be found in Beijing such as The Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, The Temple of Heaven and now the drum and bell towers.

The bell tower (the clue is in the name) is a brick built tower left with the exposed brick on show which it itself its quite unusual as most of the buildings have been rendered and painted in that terracotta red earthy colour but not this one. The building was designed to allow for the carry of sound out across Beijing and comes complete with the name famous Chinese pagoda style roofs with all the beautiful ceramic glazed roof tiles. It’s actually been reconstructed over time (as has the drum tower) as it succumbed to fire over the years but both towers have one thing in common, the signalling of time. So the absolutely massive bell at the top of the tower would sound out across the city to mark time both in hours and days and weeks and years.

There is of course a Chinese legend that goes with the tower and specifically the bell itself. The story goes that the emperor wanted the tower to be working so he gave the craftsmen 80 days to make the bell. As the bell was so huge every bell that they cast kept failing with cracks so they could not be used so they had to keep smelting down the metal and keep trying. In the end the emperor grew tired of waiting and told the craftsmen that if it was not completed in 80 days he would behead them all.

So this was quite a threat, and on day 79 the bell had still not been cast as it still kept failing. The master craftsman’s daughter asked to see the factory to feel for evil spirits hoping that she could help her father solve the problem by ridding the foundry of bad thoughts and deeds. As the bronze reached temperature the young girl threw herself into the molten metal and at this point the sky changed colour along with the bronze in the cauldron. Knowing his daughter would be dead the master craftsman ordered that they try to cast the bell one more time with the remains of his daughter’s body in the liquid. The bell was cast, finally and no one was beheaded! To this day they have a separate temple that worships the girl of the bell!

To get to the top of the bell tower you have to climb some serious steps, these things are slippery granite with almost a vertical incline and once you’re on there’s no place to stop, certainly one way to get your heart rate up.

There was not much else to see at the top of the tower though. It was a very overcast day today in Beijing and this morning we had even had to put our umbrellas up for a while. The sky looked white as we looked out across the huge city that never seems to end but facing us but some 100m away was our second tower, The drum tower.

The drum tower in all honestly externally almost looks a complete copy of the bell tower apart from the finish. This tower is rendered and pained in that familiar red earthy shade.

Again we had to climb a vertical mountain of steps to get to the top and again the purpose of the drum tower was to mark occasions or events or time. Of course there is no bell at the top here but a room of drums. Not drums that a marching band would use but huge two metre wide drums that stand sideways on big heavy floor stands. There were rows of them on either side of the tower facing out to Beijing so their sound would carry. The drums were lined up in rows of about ten each side so the noise when they were all being banged together would have been tangible indeed. Of course the red lacquered drums that were on display here today were not the originals. These had been lost or destroyed or burnt (remember the drum tower had a fire too). There was one drum on display that claimed to be original though, there was not much left of it all the animal skin was damaged and the wood falling apart around the hollow barrel but you could still tell this was meant to be a drum. Leaving the drum room behind we gain looked out across the city and could see the area (Bar Street) we had gone to eat at on our first night here so it felt like a good plan to make that our next point of call in the day and get a well deserved drink (and rest the feet for a bit).

So Bar Street it was, it still looking beautiful set around the lake. It was without the night atmosphere though and many of the actual bars were well and truly closed so you didn’t get to hear all the Chinese musicians playing but it’s still a great place to head for in the day, most of the restaurants and snack bars are still open and the lake truly is beautiful with it lotus flower lily beds. We stopped for a Frappuccino and a sandwich, avoiding anything Chinese as we fancied that for dinner tonight and didn’t want to max out on it. The last two nights dinners had hardly been a taste sensation what with Pizza and a KFC but you know that was because we had been eating massive Chinese lunches so we did not want to make that error again.

It was back on foot and a walk through the very nearby Beihai Park. The park and the palaces that are contained within the parks walls are actually the old centre of Beijing before the Ming Dynasty built the forbidden city palace complex and it sits just off to the side, about a block away from there. I have to say these were actually some of the most beautiful places and gateways that we have seen in the whole of our time in Beijing and we kind of just stumbled upon them. Yes, they were on our list of things to see but we were certainly not expecting them to be so magnificent and colourful and beautiful. The buildings are all set around a lake again with boats cutting across here and there. What made it more specials were the use of ceramics into the actual construction of t gates and the facades. Normally we have only seen ceramic used on roofs but here there were tiles and plaques and intricate details cut into the painted render and the effect was stunning. We were so glad that we had stumbled upon this park, it’s a real must see!

It took us over an hour to walk the park and by now you could really feel the weather closing in on us and it wasn’t long until the sound of thunder was heard in the distance, getting closer and closer. We picked up our pace and headed around the forbidden city (quite some walk) and down to Tiananmen Square and the subway station that would take us to our next destination. We just about made it as the heavens opened.

Our next stop was picked one because it was something completely different and secondly because it was going to be dry, yes we were heading for a mall. The subway journey took us right out to the outskirts of Beijing and once again the city felt very different. This was new Beijing, large motorways cutting through newly built hi rise skyscrapers. Office blocks and banks seemed to be everywhere with luxury malls and brands breaking up the office spaces. Out here the pathways and pavements felt wide and organised, the sides of the roads had been significantly landscaped but the main underlying feeling was that this was new Beijing and with cranes and new building going up around us the city is still very much expanding.

Our intention had been to find a shopping mall that was marked on the hotel map that they had given us but once we were off the subway there seemed to be no sign of this place but the GPS on the phone highlights that there was another mall up the road with an apple store so that seemed like a good idea to head for that.

There was no rain nor any sign of it out here, it was still hot and oppressive though and it did feel like the heavens could open at any minute. We walked for a good hour to get to the mall and once there we were very disappointed. This was not a moochy kind of mall but one of elite top tier goods with all the big name designers represented. They had even gone as far to build standalone stores all in really beautifully designed stores that did define the individual brands this was indeed top tier.

As this stuff is well out of our league we headed for a coffee, bought some toothpaste and deodorant and headed back to the subway and the hotel. It had not been a wasted trip though as we had seen yet another side to Beijing, one that we had seen in the car on the way in when we got off the cruise ship.

Back at the hotel we chilled for a while, organised some stuff before heading opt for dinner. Neither of us was feeling particularly hungry and but we had a real craving to find some noodles, chow mein would have been great and you would think that in China that would be easy wouldn’t you?

We headed up the pedestrianised street to the APM mall which has two floors full of restaurants and went on the hunt for noodle and found nothing, not one noodle box bar. We could have had pigs intestines, calf foot, beef tripe, fermented meats in god knows what, gristle dishes and all kinds of cuts of meats that we wouldn’t touch in England, these were all on the top of the menu here in the plethora of restaurants.

So what did we do? We went for a Thai meal, at least we could understand the menu! Us and Thai food is not a good mix to be honest as as soon as we start reading through the menu we just want everything, the flavours are so good and tonight’s meal was no exception.

We went from looking for some simple noodles to ordering a two course meal of fantastic Thom Kar soup and red curry with Trevor having fish cooked in a banana leaf, just yummy but far too much. We both washed it down with a big bottle of local beer and felt stuffed as we walked back to the hotel. Best laid plans and all that but the food was good!

It was still not time to relax, Jonathan got the ironing board out and started to plough through more of that to try and get it under control whilst Trevor continued arguing with the website, trying to sort of the photographs that have become the bane of his life. Jonathan solved the pygmy ironing board problem by standing it on top of the bed although by doing this he found yet another problem, put too much weight on it and it collapsed (these things are meant to try us).

Ironing done, packing complete we were as ready as we could be for the morning and with the alarm set for 0730 we were done for the night.