Our China Trip May 2012

Finn, Georgie and I are sitting on a plane on our way to Beijing. The first leg finds us touching down in Singapore for a couple of hours after an unusually long 8 hour flight from Melbourne. Maybe it’s because we had so little sleep last night…… I got about 2 hours.

We then have another 6 hour flight to Beijing where we arrive at 1am. If we see bed before 3am I’ll be surprised.

I spoke to Allissa before we took off. She’s in Byron Bay for a few days. We both agreed that it’s a good thing to leave Melbourne for a while.

I’ve done minimal research on Beijing but I think I can come up to speed by Saturday.

I played it safe for the first  3 nights and booked The Ascott Beijing, a reasonably sized apartment hotel. I’m starting to trust Ascott and Somerset for my arrival in a city. We stayed at Somerset in both Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi late last year and it worked quite well. On Sunday we move to the Double Happiness Courtyard Hotel a far more traditional, albeit expensive place. It appears that in Beijing you pay for “authenticity” and a more traditional Chinese ambience.

For the first time ever we put our cat, Ignatius into a cat boarding home. I was happy with what I saw when we dropped him off late on Wednesday. It’s too damn cold for the poor old boy to sleep outside.

My only experience with Beijing is reading about the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao and my somewhat flawed knowledge of 20th Century China. I’m not even too certain about what the Boxer Revolution was all about BUT…….

I started predicting that China would take over from America as the major world power about 15 years ago. I’m about to see for myself where they have come to now in 2012.

Beijing, as a seat of power only came to fruition in the 13th Century at the time of the Mongol invasion.

Unlike most other major cities is is not located near a large river or the sea.

In 1215 Genghis Khan’s armies destroyed Beijing which gave rise for the city to erupt as the most important in China for the past 800 years.

Under Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis, Dadu (great capital) as it was known then was the capital of the largest empire the world had known up to that time.

The Forbidden City and The Temple of Heaven were built in the early 1400’s.

The Manchus took over in the 17th Century and then in the ensuing years there were many power plays but as far as Modern History is concerned January 1949 was terribly important as that was the time when Mao’s People’s Liberation Army marched into the city after years of conflict with The Nationalists (Kuomingtang) and in 1937 with the Japanese.

I’m certain the Communists didn’t do a lot for the architecture, but that period certainly helped shape my early years and China’s and the world’s as well.

I became quite intriuged with the wave of social change that took China by storm. I was 14 when the Cultural Revolution began.

The images of this period have been adopted by the new contemporary artists of China and now are being recycled through the east and west as reminders of a time of great pain for a nation but also a time that acted as a catalyst for modern China. Artists have once again made something good out of something bad.

It’s around 7.30 pm and we once again up in the air about 30 minutes out of Singapore. We didn’t even get a chance to eat anything in Singapore due to the plane arriving late.

So, the next stop is Beijing at 1am local time.

It’s now 11pm, 2 hours to go. This is my longest  flight since Prague in late 2006. It’s gruelling. We are above China just to the west of Nanchang on about the same latitude as Shanghai, 1300 kms from Beijing, almost 9000 kms from Melbourne.

Friday 11th May

We’ve just had our first day in Beijing.

We arrived at the airport at 1am. After clearing customs and getting our luggage an hour had transpired. Full of hope for a sleep in a real bed we went outside to the taxi stand.

Much to our dismay there was a queue of well over 200 people and hardly any taxis. The wait looked like it was going to be at least 3 hours so Georgie negotiated a ridiculously expensive mini bus trip to the apartment. The taxi should have cost about $12-$15, we ended up paying $75. But in the bigger picture it was worth it.

The first thing that struck me on the trip in from the airport was the incredible amount of pollution. It was almost like there was a dust storm descending on Beijing.

The Ascott is pretty good although it’s in the centre of the business district surrounded by skyscrapers and offices. The advantage is that we have a huge apartment on the 18th floor, a swimming pool that we haven’t seen yet and free internet connection. After coming back tonight I must admit that it is growing on me.

I didn’t get to sleep until around 3.30am.

Ding Dong…….9am, the door chime rings. I awake from a deep sleep of about 5 hours. A new day has begun. I must say that I wasn’t impressed with what I saw outside the windows. A colourless sky and large office buildings. I went down to the breakfast room but was hugely disappointed. Standard Somerset/Ascott fare but not anywhere as good as Bangkok where is is only just functional.

We finally got out the door at around 1.30pm. We had decided that we needed to get some sort of bearings and headed to The Forbidden City and Tianamen. This area seemed a bit more “Chinese” albeit a bit too touristy. We walked around a bit, had some lunch and walked around the walls of the Forbidden City. We decided that today wasn’t the right time to do our “official tour” so all of our activity was on the outside. We ended up opposite Tianamen Square and walked down the bold and majestic boulevard towards our apartment.

Our first stop was in an upmarket shopping area where I got my Chinese SIM card for my phone. We then discovered a hutang (alley) that housed a market full of exotic food stalls…..live scorpions and other “wormy” things on skewers ready to be barbecued. We were accosted by marketeers selling typical tourist stuff but had fun in the process, playing along and endearing ourselves to the traders.

Then we began our “Long March”, you’d think we could have just hailed a taxi but NO. It seemed to be impossible. Beijing has it’s own code of honour when it comes to taxis. None of them want to use a meter, the prices they demand are exorbitant and none of the drivers speak English. It turned out to be a godsend because we started walking. We weaved through the backstreets and realized that we had found the real Beijing. This was the first time I felt good about being here. It got better and better and my feat got sorer and sorer but it was the highlight of the day for me. On our way back we ate Peking Duck and I took loads of photos. Beijing has started to unfold.