I'm writing this from our next country - not this time through laziness, but due to the censorship in China. Blog sites are often not accessible in this controlled society, and you certainly would have to be careful about what you wrote 'just in case'. So, instead I waited, and now I can speak more honestly about our experiences.

After Cambodia the pace of travel continued. We returned over the Thai border back to Bangkok, and than got a wonderful sleeper train to Chaing Mai. (Comfortable, fast and air conditioned). We did a short jungle trek - short because we both got ill. I certainly have a strong suspicion that it was due to staying at a hostel in town - LIBERA (recommended in Lets Go). We met some Germans who said 70% of all other guests had been ill that week.

We then meandered back to the capital after first seeing the Tribal Musuem of Thailand, and the old capital, before heading to the airport in Bangkok, for our flight to Beijing.

It is the monsoon season, and I hear that China has been in the news back home due to the high death toll caused by the floods, and the occasional typhoon. As a result of this, our flight was delayed for about 8 hours, and then landed in a terrific thunder storm at around 3am. For us, this was our first significant delay on all the flights, and as we were stuck in Hong Kong ariport for the duration, we really couldn't complain. There are probably few better airports in the world with more distractions to help you kill time!

Beijing is full of its preparations for the 2008 Olympics. The construction work is well underway, with the key stadiums already built, just the services, carparks and pedestrian accesses to go. They are still working on several projects to improve public transport (desperately needed) - several new tube lines, putting more busses on the roads and trying to limit the number of private vehicles. Each day in Beijing there are 1100 new cars on the roads. The car is the one item that every Beijinger wants - perhaps a symbol of freedom and economic well being. However, everyone wants to exercise their 'freedom' all at the same time, and the grid lock is inevitable. Smog hangs over the city, and in 8 nights spent in the city, we saw the sun only once. (The smog did though keep the temperature down and prevent us from burning!)

Anyway, back to the Olympics! On TV there there are commercials to help the locals with simple English. Students are being encouraged to approach tourists and help them if needed, and the population as a whole is being encouraged not to spit in public. We certainly benefitted from the friendliness campaign. Often we would be looking lost on a street corner (street names are in Chinese characters) and a student would come and help. On one occasion, a guy was practicing his English with us on a train journey. Afterwards he helped us find accomodation and got us 'locals rates' (rather than farang rates) and had dinner with us. We swapped emails, but have not heard from him since.

Sadly this last campaign- the spitting - was not showing positive results, yet. They spit everywhere! You have to dodge it when busses go past, they spit inside trains, in restaurants, internet cafes....is it cultural, or something to do with the pollution? Men, women, old, young, business types and beggars. All the same. Incidently, Beijing has the highest influenza rate in the world!

I have already hinted at another thing that marks Beijing out as being so different to the other places that we have already been to - It was the start of the football season, and the bbc website was blocked. How could we keep up with the Pompey fortunes without the bbc? English newspapers are not available, but instead a careful selection of stories from arround the world are published in the People's Daily. They reported on the yobs in Tewksbury who weed in the water supply after the floods, and that a Chinese girl had reprimanded a fellow passenger on a train for throwing a banana skin out of the window. This is China - a huge country, a huge population - and yet the stories we could access were trivia / aimed to show negatives in other nations.

In Beijing there is a constant press of people, lots of private enterprise, and little evidence of the ideologies of Communism or equality. I did look quite hard to find some, but felt it inadvisable to ask too many direct questions!

While in the capital we did the compulsory sight seeing. We had a 10 km walk alng the Great Wall, and no, it can not be seen from space, Marco Polo, but it is VERY impressive. We visited the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace, looking at the excesses of the the Imperial Dynastys. - Strangely, or ironically, in Beijing, we could not find reference to any of the great achievements that have occurred in China since 1949. Or indeed, any reference to the Communist control. This was odd, as Mao is still a revered leader, and his face pops up all over the place. Could it be that writing history became so dangerous, that no one did it?

We stayed in the capital longer than expected. We had to apply for visas for India, and I didn't feel comfortable leaving for the countryside without our passports. So, we had to wait! In the embassy it took 1 and 1/2 hours just to obtain a form to apply for the visa, and then 3 supplimentary forms were produced. We were also charged an extra 100 yuan each as we were applying for it in a country that we were not resident. When we finally left the embassy, we certainly felt we'd had our first taste of Indian bureaucracy.

With our passports intact, we headed out for the second phase of our visit to China, and we were soon to realize how much of a sanitised view of China we'd had so far!

I'll write about this another day!