Beijing: a long overdue nod to China's ancient capital

We've met a lot of people along the way who have followed a similar route to us, and come down through China to enter South-East Asia. Since most of those people hated Beijing and the soup-like blanket of air pollution that hangs over the city most days of the year, we've started to realise just how lucky we were with the five days of glorious sunshine and clear blue skies that we had in November.

It took us a while to crack the Chinese government censors to be able to access the blog, so I never got around to posting anything from northern China. That's a shame, because we loved Bejing, Pingyao and Xian...but better late than never I suppose.

Neither of us had very high expectations for Beijing. After all, most of the press you read about China's capital is negative and the reports about the city's air pollution are nothing short of grim. But contrary to all of our preconceptions, Beijing turned out to be extremely well ordered, very easy to negotiate with excellent public transport, clean (at least superficially), friendly and, in short, awesome. With a population of around 23 million, you'd expect Beijing to seem ultra crowded, noisy and hectic. This could not be further from the truth. Compared to Bangkok (7 million), Beijing seems almost serene.

We stayed in a hutong north of the Forbidden City, a district of interconnected laneways and picturesque pedestrian streets lined with traditional houses, temples and chic boutiques and cafes. After nearly walking the soles of our shoes off the first day, we rented bicycles for the remaining days and cruised through tiny backstreets and down Beijing's remarkably relaxed thoroughfares, with many a dumpling break between sightseeing stops. 

 

Like everyone else who comes to Beijing, we made the obligatory trip out to see the Great Wall of China (or rather, the small section between Jinshanling and Simatai), which has the distinction of being every bit as spectacular as it's cracked up to be. 

The wall is an amazing feat of human engineering and the scale of it is difficult to appreciate, even when you're standing on top of it. Perhaps even more amazing is that you get to experience it all in relative tranquility...we saw just one t-shirt tout over the whole 6km stretch. 

And then of course there's the food. It was in Beijing that we realised extra meals would have to be scheduled to accommodate the vast quantity of awesome things we wanted to try. The Inverse Law of Asian Restaurants applies here as much as anywhere...the best food we ate was always in the shabbiest places. 

The owner would take our order with a fag hanging out of his mouth while large tables of Chinese men (Ladies Who Lunch has definitely not taken off in China just yet) were slamming down beers and screaming ganbei (cheers) at anyone who happened to make eye contact. There would be bins next to all the tables for patrons to hawk into (which is better than them doing it on the floor. Just.) and the air would be thick with cigerette smoke. But the food was always sensational. 

So thanks Beijing. We loved you and I hope we'll see you again someday. Maybe next time around we'll even duck in and visit the super-creepy embalmed body of Chairman Mao (and while we're at it, we can zip over to Moscow and check out Lenin, who we also missed).