Today was our last sightseeing day in Beijing so we had decided to take in the Summer Palace. It was about 12km away but we sussed out the right bus with no problem (apart from the normal Beijing traffic). The 1st stop in the palace was breakfast - we ended up in a reproduction old street from the 19th century. Tourist traps are the same the world over - very pretty but the food was expensive and awful.The summer palace was a wonderful place all the better for it...

Our first day in Beijing was getting organised - we started with a trip to the Vietnamese embassy to get visas. Getting around Beijing is so much easier than Russia - everything is in English as well as Chinese and the people are extremely helpful. Not so at the Vietnamese embassy - she could issue a visa but we had to be exact about our date of entry and her advise was to do this in Kunming before we left for Vietnam. We then tried to organise the rest of our st...