Travelling in China – Part I

Night flight from Europe to the capital of China has enabled us to walk the China wall and dynasty Ming’s tombs. Walking on the wall is a special experience.  Big stone blocks, piled onto each other raise questions how people could built something like that 7000 years ago. The mighty wall impresses every visitor. The Chinese tourists also impress you. They want to take picture with you, give you their children to hold and are very kind. 

 

We continued our trip with visiting tombs of Ming dynasty. They are mighty, special and have an interesting park, but what caught our interest were older people on the parking lot, who moved in rhythm of Tai-Chi. Individual and group exercise of Tai Chi can be seen in Beijing on every step (on parking lots, in parks, in front of shopping centres...). What also impressed us was six-lane road. You couldn’t see the end of the heavy traffic.

At night we arrived to Hutong in the centre of Beijing. Hutongs are old, autochthonous parts of city centre. They are a real attraction. They are built low, asphalt road is full of wholes and dust, electric installation is wired everywhere and in weird ways. 

 

In the late afternoon, they welcomed us in Youth Hostel Far East International. Sleeping was healing on the first day. We slept in a dorm and shared a big bathroom at the end of the hall. We had a possibility to have breakfast at the hostel, but preferred to have a snack in a shop down the street, or in bakeries or street stalls. 

 

Further trips in Beijing and trying the culinary delights of the east were something special. From extreme crowds and scuffles on the underground stations to the sound on the calculator where the sales woman charged us a different price of Snickers every day. 

And then there is McDonalds on every step, which takes care for bigger dress sizes of Chinese and Chinese restaurants and stalls with local food. Worms, snakes and scorpions are just some treats that you can find on stalls, which are sometimes more hygienic than the restaurants. These are without toilet (Chinese are still using public toilets without doors) and most of the times children are satisfying their bodily needs in front of the entrance while their mothers patiently wait with toilet paper.  Let me mention that toilet paper is obligatory in your backpack as eating sticks. Sticks can be found on a table in a restaurants in a big bowl where people put them after eating. You can expect new ones while ordering food, but the waiter, who is usually also the chef, tells you in Chinese that the used sticks are completely acceptable for further use.

 

You can’t really talk all the time in Beijing because of the polluted air, which was a surprise for us. We have been friends for 20 years but still haven’t told everything to each other. In the morning we talked all the time but when the afternoon came, we just nodded to each other. After consulting the rest in the team, we quickly figured out that others also have a burning sensation in their throats, which calms down during the night and comes again in the afternoon. Despite not singing at a metal concert, we lost our voices after a few days. 

Beijing is a complete opposite of Shanghai and city Guilin, where we travelled to.

 

It is certainly right to show you the mysteries of the most common travelling through China. The train is almost so magical as buying the tickets. Well, that was in 2014. You have to be especially careful in time of holidays. There’s almost a billion people living in China and if 10% of them travels, that means that 10 million people are trying to travel at the same time. 

 

Train tickets are available three weeks before departure on the internet and 10 days before departure on train stations. You cannot make a reservation, it goes by the rule first served first come. When the time comes and buying the tickets is possible, you can’t buy them because you don’t have a Chinese credit card. It all leads to a fight to get to the line at the train station as soon as you arrive to China and wait to have a turn to speak in Chinese. Yes, you read correctly. The salesmen don’t understand English. 

Let me come back to travelling with trains. If you travel long distance, we recommend fast trains and night train. The price depends on accommodation - you can stand, sit (on benches or luxury chairs), or have a bed. You can choose a room in different coaches, which depend on a train: “hard sleeper”, “soft sleeper” or “luxury soft sleeper”. Because there were six beds in our cabin, we also have to choose which bed we want to have – the low, the middle or the high bed. Everything determines the price of the ticket. We wanted to experience authenticity and live like the locals and get some sleep after tiring Beijing, so we chose “hard sleeper” and the lower bed (the more expensive one, but it didn’t pay off). The lower bed is a little more expensive than the middle bed but we do not recommend it. When you stretch your legs walking through coaches, your roommate have a party on your bed with food and drinks. We had luck that we didn’t have cabin doors and the smell of food was quickly gone (the windows can’t be opened). 

 

This is it from us for this edition of Globetrotter. In the next one, we will tell you how we left Chinese capital and visited a village and finished a trip in Shanghai.