| We started off in Beijing. The first thing we went to
was the Great Wall and this is the cable car up to the entry point.
They say that the Great Wall is the only man-made object that can
be seen from the moon. That's because it's so high up it's nearer
than almost anything else. |
|
| There were battlements, lookout towers and waystations
along the wall. Some parts of it are in a pretty poor condition, so
we couldn't get to them. Otherwise we would have walked the entire
wall. Honestly! |
|
| I suppose that during the hardline Communist era this
flag would have been part of a demo of some sort. It was advertising
a nearby hotel. How times change. |
|
| It may be big, it may be old, but it's not flat.Some
bits had stairs to climb up, other bits had inclines of quite alarming
steepness. By this time we were nudging each other saying "we're
on the Great Wall of China, how cool is that?". |
|
| Cable car up, and on the way down you had three choices.
You could walk (yeah, right), take this ski-lift thing or toboggan
down what looked like a gigantic rubbish chute. We chose the toboggan.
I wished I hadn't, I kept grinding to a halt and undid a dozen sessions
of physio on my left shoulder. I also used a week's worth of bad language.
As we left, Mary, Gemma and I got our first glimpse of Dus' haggling
skills. |
|
| Mao's tomb at Tiannamen Square. |
|
| These days, the military presence in Tainnamen is smaller
and less homicidal. |
|
| Over the road from Tiannamen is the Forbidden City.
This is the entrance. |
|
| This was our first sighting of the way the Chinese toddlers
dress. Arse al fresco. |
|
| The Forbidden City is this massive place full of temples,
courtyards, terraces - the whole royal schtick. Truly, truly amazing
place. We had half a day there, you'd need two or three days to see
it all. |
|
| View inside one of the temples. Most had access either
restricted or forbidden. |
|
| Lots of ornate gateways and things like that, even the
most incidental bits were decorated. Through this gateway on the right
was..........the toilets. |
|
| As befits the home of an Emperor, the gardens here were
stunning. Some of the trees were so old they were supported by tree-crutches.
Take note, London Borough of Barnet, you don't have to hack things
down. |
|
| This is where Janet learned about the magnolia. (Inside
joke) |
|
| The Summer Palace. Very nice, but to visit it after
seeing the Forbidden City is perhaps not the best of schedules. Still,
we had our share of old Chinese architecture. |
|
| There are a lot of people in China. So when they have
organised trips, they are very big and make a lot of noise. Sitting
on the right of this picture are some of the old folk. |
|
| The Long Corridor. It's about half a mile long, with
these great paintings along the top of the inside, all of them different
(I didn't check, I took the Janet's word for it.) |
|
| Clsoe up of some of the artwork. |
|
| Here's the Monkey King! |
|
| The Dragon Lady's boat. |
|
| We came across a large number of baffling signs, many
of which either made no sense or made us wonder about the thought-processes
behind them. |
|
| Sunset fromthe window of the overnight train from Beijing
to Xi'an. We had the luxurious "soft sleeper" berths.At
the lowest level you have a bare wooden bench to sleep on. Well, nice
as it was I hardly slept at all, bumping away for about ten hours
over points and track joints. Beijing Station was massive, makes Clapham
Junction look like a country halt. There are more staff per carriage
on Chinese railways than are employed on the whole of South Central
Trains. |
|
| Inside one of our berths. Very cosy, isn't it? |
|
| The first thing we visited in Xi'an was the Wild Goose
Pagoda. |
|
| Very colourful inside the temple part of the Pagoda. |
|
| By Chinese standards, Xi'an is a small city. By ours,
it's huge. This is tytpical of the CD and DVD shops which we later
raided for en masse. This will interest nobody but those who were
there, but that's the speaker that blared out "SOLDIER! SOLDIER!
DRIVER! DRIVER!" I have it on tape! |
|
| View of either the Clock Tower or the Bell Tower from
the bottom end of North Street. Traffic chaos all around. I really
liked Xi'an, especially the dumpling place we ate in. Twice. You eat
yourself to a standstill in China for about £3. |
|
| More of Xi'an. I think this was over the road from the
bookshop where one of the assistants followed us around for about
an hour, and round the corner from the department store that had about
3 million pairs of shoes. |
|
| Nobody's putting lights round my annular passage! |
|
| Xi'an has a large Muslim population, this is inside
the oldest mosque in the city. Islam, but with a Chinese perspective.
Round the corner we met an Australian who was teaching English in
Xi'an, had been there for 8 months, and knew the Mandarin for "Another
beer please" and nothing else. |
|
| Our first taste of Chinese bazaars. As I recall, we
didn't decimate them in the same way we did in Shanghai. |
|
| The bizarre face of capitalism. About 80% of the stalls
had the same stuff. How do they make a living? No Mao watches on show
here, however, which does differ from most of the stalls. |
|
| Terracott Warriors. What can I say? Mind-boggling. An
army of clay warriors to defend the tomb of the dead emperor, they
took 28 years to make. They are still digging them up. I have the
official book, signed by the farmer who found them. |
|
| Highly-zoomed close-up of on of the warriors. They had
been buried underground for hundreds of years. |
|
| This is the biggest pit of warriors. You have to be
impressed with the way they covered the place over with such speed. |
|
| Not just people, they did horses as well! |
|
| At the back of the first pit were rows of soldiers and
horses waiting to be displayed in their ranks. |
|
| So, now you can either go on
to page 2 |
| or go back to the
home page |
| or, as an extra special treat,
go on to see PINK HAT MAN |
