We had a fairly eventful start to our journey from Xi'an.

It was raining . . . it appeared to be taxi-driver shift change time and no one would take us to the train station - cue a bit of stress! Graham spent an inordinately long amount of time trying to explain to a taxi driver what a **** he was . . . Graham swore, Gemma swore at Graham for swearing. It didn't help!

A very friendly Chinese guy came to our rescue and persuaded a taxi driver that he did want to take us to the station (nevermind the fact there was already someone in the cab!) and we got there in the nick of time!

We awoke to a smog-free Beijing - which was a real treat and apparently is fairly unusual! It has remained clear blue skies ever since! Gorgeous!

On the first day we took a look at Tian'anmen Square - it was big. And busy, but pretty impressive. We also went to the Forbidden City - which was also big. And busy! But very cool. We could easily have spent a week in there and still not seen all of it!

Our second day was spent rather unfruitfully trying to get our visa extended . . . the man he said no! More than once! We gave up and went to the Temple of Heaven instead! Rather than head to a more friendly town to try again (we've only got a week left), we've decided to go directly to Shanghai and fly to Tokyo from there and return back into Southern China when we have procured ourselves another visa. We're looking forward to catching up with Lianne and Katharine (who, we've heard rumours will also be Shanghai while we're there - bizarre!).

Our second evening in Beijing was weird! We were just walking out of our hostel, when who should walk in but our friend Scott's brother, Gary, who lives in Melbourne! Small world!

Since then we've been to the Summer Palace, seen some Kung Fu, done lots of shopping and been to the great Great Wall of China!

One thing about Beijing is - it's COLD! Winter seems to have started early here this year. Bit of a problem in that we sent our warm coats back from Xi'an . . . so today we found the silk market and had a wonderful time purchasing ourselves lots of nice new warm jumpers . . . and not so warm, but just as necessary, handbags and t-shirts among other things! Needless to say we now need to ship some more stuff home!

The Wall. Well. It's Great! We went to Jinshanling (good tip Louise and Alex - thanks!), and hiked 10km along it to Simatai. Some parts were restored and some parts weren't - and it was good to see both. Incredible to see it stretching as far as the eye can see in both directions. There were hardly any people the whole way and we loved it! It was worth coming to China just for that and definitely worth a return trip in the future.

We've done lots of walking exploring Beijing over the last few days and we've realised we're quite lucky to be staying in one of the few remaining hutong districts (old bits!). There is construction going on all over the place in preparation for the Olympics (which as the big clock in Tian'anmen Square says is only 283 days away!) and shiny new highrises are popping up all over the place.

Overall we've loved Beijing and enjoyed our 6 days here - we leave for Shanghai tomorrow night and intend to explore some of the remaining park and lake areas tomorrow before heading off . . . with much heavier backpacks!