When Mum and I arrived in Beijing airport on 1st July it was 8am, and by the time we had got through customs the problems were just about to start as our transfer car had not arrived to take us to our accommodation A couple of phone calls and two hours later our driver eventually showed up!A further 50 minutes later and we were at the hotel but it was a further 40 minutes before we had checked in as the hotel had no record of our booking.

I hadn't slept much on the plane (or during Glastonbury festival either) and following the flight I felt terribly dehydrated, the heat in China was rather unbearable which also didn't help.Later that evening when I felt less of a zombie we both made our way to Tiananmen Square and also stumbled across some night markets were we decided to eat. It was great fun buying food from the stalls and eating it in the streets with all the Chinese people and then moving on to the next stall and buying something else that took your fancy.

Over the following two days we visited the Lama Temple (which is the biggest Buddhist temple in Beijing), the Olympic park village (absolutely gigantic) and the Summer Palace which was unbelievably stunningly beautiful, the heat felt like being in a furnace at times as it took about four or more hours to walk around.

On the third day in Beijing I actually began feeling normal, the five litres of water I had been drinking each day had paid off (no exaggeration)!In the evening of our third day we met up with a company called Intrepid for a nine day tour called "a taste of China", with the Intrepid tour group we went to the Great Wall. Unfortunately due to the pollution haze over Beijing the wall appeared as if it was in the clouds, but climbing the wall was awesome, steep, hot and sticky but good fun (every now and then there was shade to hide from the heat).I also had a 200 metre race with Nigel one of the other tour members up the steep steps, my running over the last two months back home must have paid off as I won by a mile.We made our way up to the wall on ski style chair lifts but we had two options on how to descend, either by the chair lift or by toboggan.The choice was obvious for me it had to be the toboggan.

In the evening after the wall and with the rest of the Intrepid tour we went to a Kung Fu show which was really good but most of us fell asleep due to the exhaustion of climbing the wall in the heat and still not overcoming the jet lag of our journeys.

On my final day in Beijing Nigel (from the Intrepid tour) and I went on a bike ride though the old Hutongs in Beijing, the Hutongs are some of the oldest residence houses in Beijing.For me this was one of the highlights of Beijing (the others being the Great Wall and the Summer Palace)as we experianced some real culture. On our journey through the Hutongs we visited two local families one who cooked a meal for us and another who was an artist and had won an award to paint for the Beijing Olympic games.The second house with the artist turned out to be a real treat as he even let me have a go of painting, using his materials!That same evening we all boarded a sleeper train to our next destination of Xi'An.