After finishing the Rally and spending sometime chilling out
in Ulaanbaatar, it was time to head out to China to do a little sightseeing
before heading back to Blighty.
In a first days we visited most of the major sights in and
around Beijing, including Tianamen square, the forbidden city and of course the
great wall. Now I’m back in England with sensiblily speedy internet (and
allowed access to blogger) I can upload a selection of pictures!
Memorial in Tianamen Sq.
After a few days seeing the sights of Beijing Rory and I
(Ant and Zoe having flown home) set off on a crazy train journey encompassing some
of China’s most polluted cities! First we headed out to Xi’an the ancient
capital and home of the famous terracotta warriors. Getting the train out to Xi’an
was an interesting experience. Once we’d managed to communicate that we wanted
to go to Xi’an leaving today the operator told us the only tickets available
were for third class seats on the slow train (which takes 20 hours). Without having
any other options we bought the tickets and set out for the train station. Catching
the train itself was quite straight forward, although the Chinese system of not
allowing you onto the platform until the train arrives meant we had a mad dash with
our heavy bags onto the train. Pretty much as soon as we’d sat down on the
rather uncomfortable seats we set out to get ourselves upgraded, the prospect
of sitting on uncomfortable chairs for 20 hours was not appealing...
From Xian we set out to see the terracotta warriors, I hadn’t
realised this is still an active archaeological dig. The warriors themselves
are really quite impressive although I wasn’t fond of the 2km hike though
tourist-tat-sellers we had to pass by to get there.
After Xian we headed out to Chengdu, a mere 12 hours train
journey, we toughed it out on cheap seats for this one! From Chengdu we set out
to see Dafo the world’s largest carved Budda! Apparently the local people had decided
to fill in the some treacherous section of nearby river with rock from this
cliff face to even out some rapids. And at the same time why not carve a giant
Budda into the rock...
Our next stop was Chongquing where we had berths on the
public ferry for a 4 day ‘cruise’ on the Yangtze River. The public ferries on
the Yangtze are more aimed at Chinese people than foreign tourists, and thus we
weren’t always entirely sure what was going on. Every morning we were woken up
by a creepily cheery announcement and music over the tannoy system. Since it was all in mandarin
we had no idea what was being said however we were both reminded of Battle
Royal ...
Every day we pulled in for various excursions to temples, side
gorges or markets, as the only white people on the boat we frequently got asked
to have our picture taken with the other folks on the boat! The final stop was
the three gorges dam near Yichang, as the largest hydro power station in the
world it is quite an impressive sight. I remember learning about this project
for geography GCSE and therefore was a little bit aware of some of the
controversies that surround it. Of course none of this is displayed at the dam
site itself which talks about the construction of the dam ‘increasing the
magnificence of the gorge’ and dam completion achieving the ‘cultural and social
aspirations of the Chinese peoples’.
After the cruise we headed back to Beijing on the overnight
train to spend our final day looking around the Temple of Heaven before setting
off to the airport to catch our flight. Too many hours later (including a 4
hour delay at Doha), we arrived tired and worn out in Heathrow, after a
fantastic two months!
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