The Summer Palace

On my last day in Beijing I visited the Summer Palace. It's about 9 miles outside of the city center, nestled around Kunming Lake. This is the view across the lake at Longevity Hill, where most of the buildings are located.



And this is the reverse view, with the Beijing skyline in the background.



I was glad I waited for a sunny day to visit here. The colors and shadows were much more dramatic than the Forbidden City was on the dreary, rainy day I visited. There are hundreds of scenes like this painted under the eaves of the Long Corridor (that's what it's called).



From inside the corridor it's easy to see how it got its name. Perhaps in the near future they'll rename it So Full of Tourists You Can't Get Through Corridor.



Not all of it is fully restored, so you can see what it looked like before they prettied it up for tourists.

Chinese food

On my Great Wall hike I met a German brother and sister who are traveling together. They invited me along to a night market where you can eat all sorts of crazy stuff. I'm pretty adventurous but I will not knowingly eat the private parts of any animal.

I will try silkworms, though. They were, well, just look at the expression on my face...



The seahorses weren't bad.



It was all deep-fried and crunchy so most of it tasted like popcorn, if anything. I tried the small scorpions but Elias was brave enough to eat a big one.



Here is Sara eating some sort of lizard.



I also ate snake, bees and a bird's nest. Then I came back to the hostel and ate a pizza.

The Forbidden City

Yesterday was rainy and gloomy but my time here is limited so I visited the Forbidden City. Tiananmen Square is named for this building. It means Gate ("men") of Heavenly Peace. The Olympics are over (although the Paralympics are in progress) and it was raining, but look at the crowd.I am so glad I waited until the Olympics were over!Today is clear and sunny so I took a few more pix of the square. At 440,000 square meters it's the largest public square in the world. This is just a small part of it.And it's small compared to the Forbidden City. I spent most of the day wandering around and only saw a fraction of it. It's a shame I couldn't see it in the sunshine, to see the colors in their full glory.This is looking up at the corner of a roof overhang.Though the scale of the place is massive the minute craftsmanship is amazing. These are two steps from a stone staircase.The Imperial Garden was presumably a peaceful, intimate place for quiet contemptlation at one time, but not any more!

Change of plans

I waited until I got to Mongolia to apply for a Chinese visa. I didn't do it in advance because I wasn't even sure I was going to be able to enter Russia, and I wasn't sure how long I'd be in Mongolia. I heard many, many horror stories about the Chinese visa process before I got here. I should have listened!

Visas for Americans cost $130. (No one else pays more than $43.) One of the requirements is proof of onward travel, such as an airline ticket out of the country. I was planning on traveling overland through Tibet into Nepal. Now, when you apply for a visa, you don't tell them you're going to Tibet. If you do you don't get a visa. It's all part of the silly game.

So I bought a ticket to Hanoi that I had no intention of using just to get the visa. I booked it for what would be my 30th day in China.

They only gave me a visa for 15 days. So I was required to buy an airline ticket but they won't let me stay long enough to actually use it! I was able to refund it (minus a penalty fee, of course) before I left Mongolia.

I was told I would have to apply for a visa extension in Beijing. How hard could that be, right? I found out today what is required from two Brazilian guys who finally got their extensions after five trips to the office. Once again, I need proof of onward travel. So I'd have to buy another ticket and pay the refund penalty. But I would also need to open an account in a Chinese bank and transfer enough money into it to pay for the trip, $100 per day.

Fuck that. (Pardon my Chinese.)

I know from Russia and Mongolia how stressful and what a waste of time this sort of nonsense can be. So I'm only going to stay here for 15 days and I'm not going to waste any of it waiting in line in a government office. My plan of traveling through Tibet into Nepal probably won't happen. I probably won't be able to go to Tibet at all.

So I'm working on Plan B. I may fly to Kathmandu, or I might skip Nepal entirely. It would be a lot cheaper to travel by train to Vietnam. We'll see.

I've already got my next stop planned. I'm going to Xi'an to see the Terracotta Army. I saw a traveling exhibition at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore many years ago and am really excited to see it.

The Great Wall

Yesterday I hiked The Great Wall of China. I did two sections, Jinshanling and Simitai. The closest section to Beijing is Badaling, and from I've heard and read it's been completely overrun by tourists. The sections I did are less traveled and more challenging.

I woke up to a monster thunderstorm and thought I was in for a long, miserable day. But it seemed to have rained long enough to scare away the tourists and then stop. The bad weather actually made for some good sightseeing, as it made the area look ghostly and mysterious.



I went with a few people from my hostel but managed to separate myself from them, so for long stretches I felt like I had the whole thing to myself.



There are sections of the wall which are in poor condition. Some portions are incredibly steep.



With the rain and the mud it was pretty treacherous in places. It's boggles the mind to consider how hard it must have been to build it.

First post from China

I left Mongolia by train today and arrived in Beijing this afternoon. What a difference!

Mongolia is the most sparsely-populated country on earth. There are less than three million people, about one million of whom live in Ulaanbaatar. China has about 1.5 billion people, 15 million of whom live in Beijing. China has over 100 cities that are bigger than UB!

My hostel is a five-minute walk from Tiananmen Square -- I can actually see it from here -- so I walked up there briefly. But now I'm going to eat and go to bed. I'm leaving tomorrow for a hike on the Great Wall, and I think it would be wise to get some rest first...

The miracles of technology

How did people travel before the internet?

I spent last night in a hostel in Costa Rica which is known for, among other things, having the best internet setup in the country. Long story short, coming here was something of a mistake, considering how little time I have left in Central America, so today I'm cutting my losses and catching a bus to Panama City. 16 hours...

I'll be arriving around 4 a.m. so I went online to find a hostel there with 24-hour reception. I was staying in San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, and like most Central American capitals, there's not much to do and it can be more than a little scary. So I decided to take advantage of the internet setup to make some additional travel arrangements.

After about an hour I had reservations for hostels in Marrakech, Morocco; Beijing, China; and Ulaanbataar, Mongolia. The hostel in Mongolia is by all accounts the best in the country, and it's $5 US per night. I booked a budget room in the most sparsely populated country in the world in minutes on the internet. I think that's pretty cool.