A very early morning today as we had to leave our hotel at 6AM to catch an early flight from Xi’an to Guilin.  Things started off on a rather down note as we got ripped off by a tag team of the cab driver and our bellman. Official cabs here have meters and a posted rate per kilometer, which generally works out to be fairly reasonable even for long distances.  When we got in the cab, the bellman said a few words to the driver and then told us in English to just pay 150 yuan for the ride to the airport.  Being 6AM and assuming the hotel staff wouldn’t be in on the scam, we just nodded and drove off.  It was only halfway to the airport that we thought through the numbers and realized that 150 yuan worked out to about 100 kilometers, roughly 60 kilometers further than the airport.

Now as much as we have been taken advantage of here, it would be unfair to leave the impression that it isn’t a pleasant place to travel.  The people overall are very friendly, but they have also mastered the art of making a little extra.  Normally we just shrug and say it’s only five bucks so who cares. Only once we think about how many times we have said that do we realize just how quickly five bucks can become real money.  Nevertheless, it is definitely part of the experience and makes for some good stories.

The plane ride to Guilin was uneventful.  From the mix of passengers, it is clear that this is a popular stop on the tourist circuit, particularly the organized group tours from North America.  At least 60 percent of the completely full flight was foreigners, and all the polyester on board had to have been a fire hazard.

Guilin itself is much different than Beijing or Xi’an.  First off, there is less pollution in the air (although it is still smoggier than most US cities). It is also a much smaller city, so it seems less hectic and we were able to spend much of the day just walking through the neighborhood around our hotel and browsing through the shops.  The biggest difference though is the scenery. Where Beijing and Xi’an were fairly flat, Guilin is surrounded by limestone karst formations that rise up for hundreds of feet. In many ways it looks like Krabi in Thailand, although it is much further inland.  As is usually the case with panoramic vistas, the pictures will hardly do justice.

We took a small boat ride on the Li River in the evening.  The boat was made up of about 10 bamboo shoots strapped together with rope and some deck chairs set on top.  With 5 people (including the driver) it seemed to barely stay afloat, but we managed to putter around for about 40 minutes seeing some of the city from the water.  Tomorrow or the day after we will take the bigger boat on the more famous trip from Guilin to Langshou.

We ended the day wandering through the market area just behind our hotel, stopping every so often to try something from the different food stores and carts. Some stops were very successful (like the bakery rack at the department store) and others not so much (the pancake with breadsticks and some kind of pickled vegetable wrapped up in it).  Neither of us has been brave enough yet to try the corn juice stand, so that one remains an unknown.

Since our only real item on our agenda for Xi’an was to see the Terracotta Warriors, we pretty much just dropped out things off at the hotel and jumped in a car for the one hour drive to the site.  The history of the Terracotta Warriors and the first Emperor of China is quite fascinating but much to long to cover here so for anyone interested, there is a pretty good summary at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terracotta_Army.

The excavation site is quite built up with facilities now to accommodate the tourist traffic, with four very large buildings encompassing the areas being worked on and a museum showing some of the other artifacts they have recovered so far (work on the actual Emperor’s tomb has been stopped while they figure out how to preserve all of the things they believe they will find once they enter it (including man-made rivers of mercury if the legends are true).  The biggest of these is Pit 1, where about 1,000 warriors have been recovered and 5,000 more are believed to be still buried.

Seeing the warriors for the first time is truly breathtaking.  As amazed as we both were with the Great Wall, this experience may even have surpassed that.  For those following our travels through the picture gallery, you’ll quickly see that we couldn’t help but take picture after picture.  The detail involved in assembling this army of warriors is simply incredible.  It is very easy to forget looking at it that what exists here was created over 2,200 years ago.

I won’t go into detail here, but for anyone interested, there are all kinds of stories in the pictures we took about how the warriors were arranged, how they were differentiated by rank, what kinds of weapons they were built with, etc., and we’d be happy to tell them when we get home.

The second building houses a much smaller site with about 40 warriors. This is believed to be the headquarters for the army and contains only officers.  The third building is another large pit (about half as big as Pit 1), but is not being excavated at this time, in part because there is still so much work to do at Pit 1, and in part because the archaeologists are trying to figure out a way to keep the paint from oxidizing as soon as it is exposed to air and flaking off (while the ones that you can see now are all a terracotta color, originally, each one was painted to look real, all the way down to fingernails on the hands).  According to our guide, the current estimate is that it will take about another 100 years before the site is completely excavated and restored.

The final building houses mostly bronze artifacts elsewhere in the tomb complex.  The most important of these are two chariots made to one-half scale to carry the spirit of the Emperor and Empress to the next life.  Again with these, while the level of detail would make them impressive in pretty much any era, that they were crafted so long ago with only the technology of the time casts them in a whole different light.

The Terracotta Warriors checked off on our list, we headed back to the city and out to a restaurant not far from the hotel.  That it was full of locals we took as a good sign, and after stumbling through a menu that was as confusing in the broken english they translated it into as it would have been in native Mandarin, we ended up batting about .500 (maybe .600 if the ribs were actually pork).

Our flight to Guiling leaves early in the morning so with that in mind, we’re calling it a day.

Last day in Beijing today.  When we first got here we were worried that 5 days was going to be too long, here we are and it’s hard to believe it went by so fast.  It is another overcast day today but not that rainy, so other than having to wear coats, we’re in pretty good shape.

Our destination today was the Temple of Heaven, which as the name implies was where the Emperor made offerings to heaven each year in hopes of a good harvest.  Like all the other imperial sites we have seen, the scale of this collection of buildings is amazing.  It is far more like a large city park than a temple so you could easily spend the better par of a day just walking around the grounds and enjoying a break from the hustle of the city.

Despite their size, the main buildings were used very little, serving mostly as storage for religious items during the year and one big ceremony conducted by the Emperor.  The rest of the time the site was pretty quiet, which, given the time and effort it would have taken to build seems like a waste.

After the Temple of Heaven we spent the rest of our day wandering around Beijing, checking out some shops here and there and some of the older neighborhoods (most of these areas are being torn down and replaced with high rise apartments so that way of life is quickly disappearing).  We had lunch in a complete dive where all we could do was point at things we wanted that other people were eating.  The food was very good though and extremely cheap (about $4 for both of us).

Around 8:00 we headed for the railway station to catch the train from Beijing to Xi’an.  As the primary means of intercity travel, the train (and station) were packed, but we had the foresight to reserve a private cabin with two bunks and our own bathroom.  The tickets were more expensive of course, but reasonable compared to an airline ticket and certainly more comfortable.  The ride itself is 11 hours so we actually slept through most of it anyway, and for the few hours we were awake in the morning we got to see some of the Chinese countryside.

Today our main goal is to see the Terracotta Army just outside of Xi’an.

Pretty mellow day today. It is raining so not a whole lot to do outside. We took a car to a rug factory that the hotel recommended and saw how the process works from the silk cocoons all the way through the finished product. The prices didn’t seem any better than any of the other stores (they were actually higher, and like every shop it was because these were the people you could trust and had the best quality so the even though it was more expensive it was a better value).

The car brought us back to the Westin and we decided to partake in the Sunday brunch. It seemed like a bit of a weak choice to have a hotel meal in the middle of Beijing, but the food looked so good that we had to try it. The food itself was excellent. The entertainment (a table full of drunk people singing and dancing not far from us) left a little to be desired. It was enough of an annoyance that we left comments to that effect on the bill when we paid so they might keep it in mind for future guests.

About an hour later, a bellman showed up at our door with a box of chocolates and a note from the manager apologizing and offering to comp one of the meals. It was quite impressive since we weren’t really asking for anything.

With the rain still falling and me getting a little stir crazy in the hotel room, we headed out to one of the market streets (given all the pollution here I might have to check my jacket for acid holes in the morning). It wasn’t exactly a night market like the ones in Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur, rather a collection of stores selling trinkety things and a row of street stalls selling food. We full from brunch, we decided to pass on the chicken hearts, kidneys, sea horses and silk worms, but we did make a bit of room to try fried ice cream (which was kind of disgusting) and the always popular snake on a stick. Yes, we both tried it and have pictures to prove it.

Some light shopping for gifts finished up the evening and then back to the hotel. Tomorrow is our last day in Beijing before we take the night train to Xian. Hopefully the weather will be a little better so we can see a few more things before we leave. We did see in the news though that a typhoon hit Hainan Island a few days ago, so things could definitely be worse. We will be there in a bout a week and plan on doing little more than flopping on the beach, so we are definitely hoping that the worst is over for a while.

Wow! Everyone has heard about it, and most people have seen pictures, but there is absolutely nothing that could prepare you for actually seeing it.

The Great Wall is truly amazing, not only given its scale, but where they managed to build it. While we were only able to see a small fraction of it (we walked about two or three miles of its 3,100+ mile length), even through the thick haze coming from Beijing, you could see it snake up and over the ridge in both directions off into the distance. This was one of the must see things of our trip and it definitely lived up to our expectations. Ang has rated it one of her top 20 days of all time (which is quite a statement since she has lived with me for so many days).

Now for the details. Despite the best laid plans, we of course didn’t get out of the hotel until after 10. We spent a bit of time finalizing our transport from Beijing to Xian (overnight train on the 21st), some more time finding a bank machine (hardly anyone outside of major hotels takes credit cards), and then some more time finding a store that sold art supplies so we could get some paper and charcoal. With all that complete, we hopped in a cab, somehow managed to tell the driver where we were going and negotiated a price and set off for the Mutianyu section of the wall (this was a compromise between the heavily touristed section at Badaling that we wanted to avoid, and the more remote section at Simatai that we initially planned on going to. The guide book we have said it was a good option and aside from some trinket booths wasn’t that busy.

About an hour later we pulled into the little town of Mutianyu where it became immediately clear that someone else has the same book we do. Several levels of parking lots were full of cabs from the city and tour buses and people were streaming up the road towards the wall. At this point, we were already committed so we headed off for the ticket booth. From where we arrived, the wall itself is way up on a ridge. There is a hiking trail about a mile long apparently, but for people like us, they have a couple of trams going up to the top. Once you get off, there is a pretty thick crowd of people, but it thins out fairly quickly as you start walking, particularly in places where it gets very steep. We took a whole lot of pictures that show the scale far better than I could ever describe it, suffice it to say the wall is very, very big. Given the point in history when it was built and the lack of any kind of machinery, it is incredible how people and pack animals could have carted all the materials up steep mountainsides and assembled such a project.

Being many hundreds of years old, the wall itself is fairly worn, with the more visited areas having been maintained and restored. A mile or so off in the distance, the serviced part ends so we decided to head that way to see an original piece. The last maintained tower at Mutianyu is at the top of a set of about 600 stairs. Bravado won out over common sense and we headed up, taking a number of breaks to keep from having a heart attack (according to our book they actually run a marathon on the wall each year and while I stood gasping for breath at step 450, I had to wonder who is crazy enough to run it). The challenge was worth it though as the view from the tower was outstanding and seeing an older part of the wall very cool. There was also a skinny little security guard up there to make sure you didn’t go any further, and you had to respect that as part of his job everyday he had to make that same climb. Maybe he’s one of the people in good enough shape to run the marathon.

Our transport down from the wall was in the opposite direction for where we started so we backtracked to the cable car drop and then walked about another half mile to the next station. There is another cable car to take back down to the little town but we opted instead for the toboggan run. This set up is a steel channel similar to a small bobsled track. You sit on a little sled with wheels and a control stick (push forward to speed up, pull back to stop) and head down, As cheesy as the whole things sounds, it was very fun and we managed to keep the video camera running (they say no pictures) and use it as a "tobaggan-cam".

Our day ended fairly uneventfully with a bit of time at a market and dinner. We have seen most of the things we set out to in Beijing, so with two more days here, we’re going to slow things down a little and relax. On the menu for today are some shops we want to see around town and maybe the last sight on our list, the Temple of Heaven. While we have good internet access, we are also trying to upload our pictures diligently, so for anyone interested, the whole collection from our China trip can be seen at: http://www.casaroberts.com/gallery/Chad-China. We haven’t gotten around to writing anything under them to describe what they are and there are a whole lot of images of the kids’ Webkinz in China, but otherwise hopefully what is there gives you a sense of what we are seeing.

The plan is to head out early tomorrow (notice I said the “plan is”) so I figured I’d try and get this written tonight. Today was a little less hectic than yesterday and we didn’t roll out of the hotel until nearly 11. Part of the morning we spent trying to figure out our travel plans once we leave Beijing. We initially booked 5 nights here, but depending on how things work, we may leave as early as tomorrow. We thought we had it all solved until we found out the overnight train to Xian was booked solid, at least for the next two days.

With no resolution to our travel plans, we left for the Summer Palace, about a 30 minute drive from the hotel. Like the Forbidden City, the place was huge, encompassing the better part of a lake roughly the same size as Lake Samish. The buildings here are also going under a lot of restoration (I assume to coincide with the Olympics) and it is quite interesting to be able to contrast the ones that are finished with those that haven’t been worked on yet. The sheer magnitude of the project is fascinating and I think only possible because the labor is so cheap.

From the Summer Palace we headed back to the city center and learned our second taxi cab lesson. Even though the car we got in had a taxi light on the top and a meter, it was soon evident that it wasn’t a real cab as the meter racked up the rate at roughly three times the speed as on the ride out. Being taken again was a little frustrating until we realized that even with the extra layer of slush, the whole scam only cost us about $10. Somewhere in Beijing though there is a guy making a killing selling phony taxi lights and meters.

The rest of the afternoon we spent in a building full of knock-off stores. For some reason, even though the Nike and Adidas stuff is in plain view, if you want the specy specy stuff (like North Face) you have to ask for it and they pull it out from behind the counter. It’s all very cheap (whether it falls apart the first time you wash it is a different question) and if you haggle enough it seems like you can get things for about 30% of the starting price.

The bulk of the time we spent at this market was at the rug shop. For about 90 minutes Angela had the staff digging through piles of rugs, opening them up and spreading them out on the aisle to look at (with the passing traffic having to try and walk around). If either of us knew anything about rugs, what we saw was probably reasonably priced, but the only data point we have is what a similar rug costs in Thailand (as negotiated by people who know as little about this kind of thing that we do). We did manage to separate ourselves from the store without buying on the spot, so we’ll see if what we can learn overnight and maybe go back tomorrow.

Our last stop of the day was an opera performance. Our travel book listed this as a must see as opera is something they have performed here for many hundreds of years (it turns out here is less about fat ladies singing and more about ornate costumes and acrobatics). The performance was split into two separate stories. The first was Farewell My Concubine, which, if you follow this kind of thing, is supposedly one of the more popular ones. For 60 minutes I thought I was in the 5th level of hell. I put it on par with the FantaSea elephant show in Phuket, but Ang says it wasn’t that bad.

The second show wasn’t near as bad, and had the first hour not been so excruciating, the whole thing might have even been worth the $50 (after all, we did get free peanuts, dates and tea). As it was though, it probably falls into the “two hours of my life I’ll never get back” column.

The big event for tomorrow is traveling out to the Great Wall (the part where all the tours buses don’t go). Hopefully, we’ve being exposed to all the obvious cab scams now and will get there and back with a few RMB left for dinner.

What was planned for a light “get adjusted” day didn’t quite work out that way. We started off fairly early (for us anyway) with a cab ride to Tiananmen Square. The unique aspect of cabs here is that none of the driver’s really speak English, so they have no idea what you are telling them when you say where you want to go. To get there, you usually have to get someone (like to hotel doorman) to write it on a card in Chinese and give that to the driver. The hotel also give you a business card with their location so you can manage to find your way back at the end of the day. Cabs are quite cheap though so a good way to get around the city.

The square itself is huge. They say it is the largest public square in the world and I believe it. It is surrounded on all sides by either very big, communist style, government buildings (the China National Museum and the Great Hall of the People) or gates, which are basically extremely tall chinese style buildings with passages cut out for people to walk through. There are a number of other monuments in the square which probably are a whole lot more interesting if you are from China, but that didn’t mean much to us so we mostly ooohed and aaahed a bit about the size of things and moved on to the Forbidden City across the street.

The Forbidden City (called the Palace Museum by the people here) is the old Emperor’s palace. It’s size is hard to imagine until you see it, but its 800 buildings and 8,000 rooms cover a space almost 1km square. When it was an active palace, all that space was reserved for the exclusive use of the Emperor, his family, his concubines (very important) and some maids and eunuchs. Parts of it are being restored now (the Hall of Supreme Harmony for example, which is the building most people would recognize from pictures) to show off for the Olympics, but even that work only touches on a fraction of what is there.

We bucked up for an English-speaking guide and it was well worth the cost. It would be extremely easy to wander around all day with a skinny guide book trying to figure out what everything was and missing out on the important parts. And with 100,000 visitors a day (according to the guide), just navigating through the horde has a certain value. There is far too much to tell here about the Forbidden City save for that it is amazing that something this big and ornate existed for one person, and that the Emperor had a really, really sweet life.

Our next stop was a Buddhist temple not far from the Forbidden City (or at least not that far on the map). After walking a few hundred meters and being propositioned by an unending stream of bicycle rickshaw people, we finally decided that letting someone pedal us there would be far more comfortable than walking (remembering that we flew all day the day before and really didn’t set out to walk all over Beijing). Having been ripped off by unofficial cabs before (think tuk-tuk in Thailand) we drove a particularly hard bargain from 80 to 30 for the ride (which a local would likely still only pay 10 for) and set off.

After riding for a while it became clear that the scale of the map is quite small, and that getting a ride was a particularly good idea. Things turned for the worse though when we saw the first sign on the street with the name of the destination that we were going to. The driver pulled into the nearest alley and told us that we were there (we were still about 2/3 of a kilometer away) and that he wanted to be paid. I reached for 30 yuan (about $4) and he started to get all frantic that the 30 he was talking about was US dollars. He even had a very official looking laminated card all bent and folded up that said the fare was 185 yuan per person.

We argued for a while, each yelling in languages neither of us understood before Ang finally took a 50 yuan note, dropped it in his basket and we walked away. He followed us for about 100 meters trying to squeeze out a few more yuan before finally giving up and pedaling away. For sure, these guys are going to make a killing when the Olympics are here scamming all the tourists.

As fun as getting to this temple was, the trip back was even more so. We figured getting a cab back to the Forbidden City would be fairly simple, but after trying a few times and having the drivers wave that no, not they wouldn’t take us there (we still don’t know why) we ended up walking (and walking, and walking). We finally made it to our destination which was a hill at the north end of the Forbidden City (according to the guide we had, feng shui required a river in the front of the temple and a mountain behind, so the enterprising people (and a few thousand slaves) built both a man-made river and a man-made mountain). It has to be one of the highest points in Beijing so the view was very impressive.

All this took us to dinner, so making the decision that while in Peking we should be sure to have Peking Duck, we headed off for a restaurant recommended in our travel book. Walking all day took its toll and we still couldn’t figure out how to get a cab, so we went part way on the subway and the rest in a bicycle rickshaw (being far more specific this time about the cost). As described in the book, the restaurant was indeed in the middle of a warren of skinny streets that we probably never would have found on our own, and it was a little scrappy looking. The food was good, although neither of us are huge Peking Duck fans so we can cross it off the list now.

Finally, on the way home we chanced across an ex-pat who helped us find a cab and let us know the secrets. After wandering several miles around Beijing, even though we got to the hotel quite early (around 7:30), the hot tub was particularly pleasant and we both probably could have slept through an earthquake.

Off to see more of Beijing.

After crawling out of bed at 5am we began our journey to the other side of the world. The flights here (three in total with stops in San Francisco and Hong Kong) were rather uneventful, but in the case of the SF to HK portion VERY, VERY long. I have a friend who makes the trip fairly regularly for work and having done it myself now I have a whole new respect for what coming out here for just a few days at a time must be like. And while the little extras like personal TVs, better food and more room are a plus, the seat that turns itself into a flat bed is worth its weight in gold.

We arrived in Beijing around 11pm. The good news about that is the airport (which is massive) wasn’t very busy so the lines through customs moved fairly quickly. By the time we got all checked in it was closer to 1 in the morning (about 10am Seattle time) so we took the opportunity to try out the video chat with the boys. We were pleasantly surprised that while it was a bit jittery, it works pretty well and it is a huge plus to be able to see their faces while we are away instead of just hearing their voices.

Looking out the window, it is very smoggy here (no real surprise) and I can see why the marathoners are all complaining about racing here for the Olympics. It looks like just walking across the street is about the equivalent of smoking 2 packs of cigarettes.

The plan for today is pretty low-key. Some general sightseeing, finding a travel agent to plan our trip to the Great Wall and Xian, and more or less just getting used to the time change. After a full day of meals on an airplane, finding a good hole in the wall restaurant is also quite high on the list.