A few weeks ago we had a fabulous week in Beijing. Personally I never thought I would go to China and to walk on the Great Wall was a rather awe inspiring experience. There are several sections within striking distance of Beijing - we visited one which was 2 hours drive away and had been renovated and was remarkably steep. The wall itself is some 6,000km long and built on ridge tops. We caught a chair lift up to the wall and had a long and really fun toboggan ride back down to the car park area. This gave us plenty of energy to climb for some distance along the wall and we were glad to do it in spring as even then it was quite hot. There were several enterprising chinese who obviously climb up each day with a huge basket filled with ice and cold drinks and they do not use the chair lift....so the cold drink was definitely worth the inflated price (still on $A1.50!) We also had a discussion about why the wall was built and decided that it was NOT to keep out the rabbits (a la bigpond ad)!

Beijing is a very spread out city - 300km from north to south and much of that is due to several very large and important places within the city - the Forbidden City is massive and there is a gate to enter it from Tiananmen Square. The Square itself can (and did) hold 1,000,000 troops on parade or protesters and tanks! It is today historically interesting and I am sure watched carefully to make sure there is no dissent.

The Forbidden City is really interesting and was our first "temple" experience. There are literally hundreds of buildings with thousands of rooms. We saw imperial jewellery and a fabulous collection of clocks from the 18th an 19th century. It is 1.5km from north to south and about 1km wide surrounded by walls and a moat and is in the centre of town. The CBD is now some distance away - I think so the tall buildings don't overshadow/look the Forbidden City. We got an english speaking guide and were really interested in the history - particularly the other side of the opium war. The City for example had enormous urns all over the site, which were filled with water all the time and heated in winter. The reason being that the Forbidden City is wooden and therefore this was its fire hydrants. The urns were covered in gold and throughout the City today you can see the scrape marks made by the bayonets of the British troops scraping the gold off in the 1840s!

The Summer Palace was the imperial holiday home and was probably a day's walk from the Forbidden City. It is over 2000 acres and has a massive lake where the navy used to do exercises as imperial entertainment. We loved the Summer Palace and went twice. There is an outdoor covered corridor which is 900m long and has something like 8,000 paintings on the roof beams - really beautiful and quite spectacular. Even going twice we really didn't see that much of it.

We also visited the Drum Tower and saw how time used to be broadcast to the citizens - using the beat of drums. We went to a Tibetan buddhist temple, which although banned during Mao's term, was actually renovated by him as a cultural relic. It is once again a practising temple and has an 18m tall Buddha carved from the one tree.

We attended two shows whilst in Beijing - one was a Kung Fu story and was a mix of Kung Fu and dance and had a cast of 50 men and 2 women! It was good, but far more impressive was a wonderful acrobat show which was simply amazing. The strength and agility of the acrobats is incredible and there were girls twirling plates on sticks whilst doing sommersaults etc and up to 12 on a bike and various contortionist things. So good that we bought the dvd of the show!

All in all we had a fabulous time in Beijing.