Nomadic Newlyweds do India–The Video

 

Video of our stay in India, if only the smells could be captured!!

We haven't fallen off the ends of the earth...

Nihao!

Not sure how many people are following along with our adventures but to those of you who are thank you!

We haven't giving up on blogging we're just in China where it seems any internet site that encourages free speech and thinking is banned (I've bent the rules a bit and found a way through it).

Anyway, we have continued writing on our experiences and will be posting everything in about a week when we get into Vietnam!

Hope all is well in whatever part of the world your reading this from!

Cheers!

H and M

Spiders on Sticks - Beijing, China

So an overnight flight with the nicely named and surprisingly modern & comfortable Dragon Airways from Kathmandu, via Hong Kong sees us land in Beijing at around lunchtime and straight into the modern international terminal which is bustling with people. Immigration is cleared in less than 5 minutes (that’s nearly an hour quicker than it takes me to get into the US with my American wife), luggage is collected and we’re left with a decision on how we’re going to get to our hostel in downtown Beijing. Normally we would take the safe yet unpredictable cost of a local taxi, however today we are feeling particularly adventurous and opt for public transport. The airport express train is again very modern, clean (not a hint of graffiti or rubbish) and takes us to a station on the Beijing Metro. We are surprised that all the signs are in mandarin, but with an English translation as are all the announcements on the metro, I guess that the 2008 Olympics must have had an influence here. The metro is again clean and efficient and we make our hostel without major incident before hitting the sack to catch up on the sleep lost overnight. That evening we head out into the now chilly (40 degrees F) darkness in search of food. We settle for a restaurant that claims to have an English menu, but on further investigation it’s a menu full of pictures, not an issue though as we are here to try Peking Duck, the local speciality and its there in all its full headed / Beaked glory on page 1! Now I will confess that my biggest concern for our time in China is my dislike of Chinese food, I don’t eat it at home, but I’m keeping an open mind while we're here and will try and sample the local cuisine. Fortunately the duck is nothing like the crispy duck found in the UK, although it is the same dish and it’s mouth-wateringly good! Chinese Food 1 – Mark 0

Airport Express Train to downtown Beijing

Illness keeps Heather in bed on our second day, so I go off in search of some painkillers to help her migraine. I find a pharmacy without much trouble, however looking at the labels of the products on the shelf is a different ball game entirely…. not a scooby what they mean! (that’s “not a clue” for our American readers). A young female assistant cautiously approaches and begins talking Chinese to me, after a bit of sign language and some pointing, she grabs a packet off of a low shelf that is clearly labelled ‘Ibuprofen’.

Next morning, a now well again Heather and I decide to walk to the Forbidden City and Tian’anmen Square, it doesn’t look that far on the map, but is a 40 minute walk away (metro will be taken for the return) The sun is shining brightly and the temperature is like a spring day in London. We avoid several ‘Art’ students, who want to show us their work, thanks to Lonely Planet for advising of this scam, and wander into a street market just short of the Forbidden City. This however was a street food market, full of delicious snacks on a stick, such as live scorpion, seahorse, cockroach, silk worm larvae, starfish and not forgetting that age old favourite, tarantula. Heather was keen for me to sample these delights (purely so she could take a photo) I, on the other hand, was not so keen!

mmmmmm yummy snacks!

The Forbidden City, a true icon of China, is so called as it was off limits to anyone without an invite for 500 years, trespassing was punishable by death. The scale of the place is impressive, as is the architecture. The palace is made up of various halls (Hall of Supreme Harmony / Middle Harmony / Preserving Harmony) each set apart from the other by a large open square, sometimes more than 200 yards long / wide. Despite the grandeur of the buildings, the Forbidden City felt empty, it’s a hard feeling to try and describe, but I was completely underwhelmed by the place. When you visit ancient cities in Europe, you can almost feel the history in the fabric of the buildings, but the Forbidden City felt like it could have been built 10 years ago, maybe I missed something important along the way.

Vast Forbidden City

Tian’anmen Square, famous for all the wrong reasons, the guy in front of the tank, the massacre of 2,000 unarmed students (or 200 including police and soldiers if you believe the Chinese government) but these days all of that taboo… a Google search on Tian’anmen Square Massacre finds you quickly blocked from websites. The square itself claims to be the largest public square in the world, it certainly is vast, surrounded by 6 lanes of traffic and then some large impressive buildings such as the Peoples Hall and The China National Museum.

A new day dawns, a new adventure beckons, today’s adventure being a trip to the Great Wall, which personally was number one on my China to do list. After a couple of stops at Hostels to collect more passengers, our bus heads the 90km outside of Beijing to the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall. Our guide tells us we have 3 hours on wall itself, so we opt for the chairlift to take us to the nearest tower and decide to attempt to walk to the furthest tower, 3kms away and 1500ft higher. We meet Heikki and Luna, who are attempting the same hike, Heikki is from Finland and is studying Civil Engineering in Seoul, South Korea, whereas Luna (from Spain), at the tender age of 20, is studying Mandarin in Beijing for 6 months, and can already speak perfect English, Finnish and French. We head off along the unexpectedly steep and uneven pathway, a freezing cold wind biting at our faces and the 2,000 or so year old wall stretching and rising off into the distance in front of us. As we walk the crowds thin and although we don’t have this section of the wall to ourselves, there are only a few people dotted along the way.

The walk takes in a lot of stone steps (flashbacks to Ulleri in Nepal) and the effort warms us, you really do feel the history as you walk along and the sheer man power required to complete this feat of engineering is mind boggling (over a million slaves). After a particularly steep section of steps, we decide that the final tower is beyond our reach, leaving Heikki and Luna to carry on (little did we know that it was only another 10 minutes away) and we head back to our starting point. Something we have already noticed in China is the Chinese girls penchant for a short skirt / shorts and high heeled boots, which in and around town was unexpected but not unusual, however they also deem this attire appropriate for hiking the Great Wall even though we find the going hard in hiking boots!

More stone steps!!

After catching our breath, we begin a slow walk back down, although there seems to be as many uphill sections as downhill (odd) and reach watchtower 6 within an hour (the way down). We had a few options on how to get down the final 500m descent, but we decided to take the traditional Chinese option………. the Toboggan!! Even though we get stuck behind a ‘go slow’ girl, it was still great fun, the track was a metal half pipe that snaked its way back down the hill and you could get up quite a lot of speed. We stopped at various stages to give the girl in front of us some distance, before tearing down the track and catching her up again.

The Great Wall is one of the wonders of the world and unlike some of the other places we have been in Beijing so far, it really doesn’t disappoint

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Next day we meet up with Heikki and Luna and head off to the Olympic Stadium complex, home of the “Bird’s Nest” and Water Cube, from the 2008 Olympic Games. Although it seems smaller in person than when you see it on TV, it is still a beautiful piece of architecture (cue me boring the pants off of Heather while I explain the way the structure works). Heikki decides he wants to go inside for a look around, but seeing the inside of an empty stadium doesn’t appeal to Heather, Luna & I so we wander over to the Olympic Boulevard and the Water Cube.

A forlorn looking Minnie Mouse wanders around looking for tourists, hawkers try and sell you replica gold medals and kites, which dance merrily in the breeze above our heads. A random Chinese guy comes over and asks / half drags me by my daypack over to his waiting girlfriend so that she can take our picture in front of the Olympic Stadium…… must be getting mistaken for Brad Pitt again pfffft!

The Bird’s Nest

Forlorn Minnie – Why wouldn’t you want your picture taken at the Olympic Stadium with Minnie Mouse??

A case of mistaken identity?

We retrieve Heikki and after some haggling with taxi drivers, we head off to the Summer Palace, the Palace where the royalty used to come to escape the summer heat of Beijing (12km outside of the main city). The palace is set on a huge lake, with a man made island complete with temple, the sun is shining but a freezing wind has arisen, so our stay at the summer palace is restricted to a couple of hours as none of us are adequately dressed for the change in temperature and also use this as a great excuse to go eat! Luna leads us to a shopping mall, which houses all the main high street names along with some designer ones, I think this is when we see a sight that most sums up modern Beijing. Outside of o the mall is a line of expensive European cars, BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar, Ferrari, in front of which sits a homeless man. The weather is freezing and he is wearing little more than rags. Although China is a communist country, it seems as if capitalism is alive and flourishing in Beijing, even if all of its inhabitants aren’t benefitting from the economic boom. We say our goodbyes to Heikki and Luna, as the next day would be our last in Beijing.

The Summer Palace

Last day in Beijing, we have an overnight train to Xi’an booked for 9pm that evening, so we have plenty of time to kill. We head out to the nearby Lama Temple, the largest and most renowned Tibetan Buddhist temple outside of Tibet which is also home to an 18m high Buddha statue, which was carved from a single piece of sandalwood. We walk through the various temple halls, in search of the giant Buddha, the Chinese in silent prayer or waving around large incense sticks. All is well until we reach the final hall, home of the giant Buddha, a woman is on her hands and knees, loudly chanting some kind of mantra, in what can only be described as a demonic voice (think Exorcist) before rhythmically banging her head, hard, against the stone temple floor. This carries on for a couple of minutes and a small crowd begins to gather, at which point a couple of temple guards decide to remove her from the temple…. bad idea. This 5ft nothing Chinese lady kicks off big time, shouting at the guards who are physically dragging her from the building. They are so shocked by her outburst, they let her go and she returns to her unique form of prayer (one that I continue to mimic at the time of writing).

Lion guarding the Lama Temple

Beijing certainly has been a major shock to both Heather and myself, both in good and bad ways. Beijing is a far more advanced, modern city that I had imagined and although the language barrier was difficult at times (mainly when ordering food), we found navigating around this vast city very easy. On the down side, the Chinese culture of smoking when eating food, chewing with mouth wide open and just public displays of indecency; hawking and spitting every 30 seconds or snot rockets in the middle of a busy street, is so far removed from what is acceptable in the west, it’s a little hard to take in.

Anyway, onwards…. to Xi’an, the home of the Terracotta Army!

- Mark ‘Chopstick Novice’ Cleverly

More pictures from Beijing can be found here