A pleasant stroll We drove to the Jinshanling section of the Great Wall this morning and set off on our 4/5 hour walk. The Great Wall is split into various sections; the most popular with tourists is called Badaling. We went to Jinshanling and Simatai which are less visited. NOT surprising - it damned near killed us, well, me anyway. The wall consists of new and original parts and the original (un-renovated) parts were pretty hair-raising. At times there were n...

Ni Hao China! We arrived in Beijing at around 2.30pm yesterday and exited the station, which was absolute bedlam. We negotiated a taxi ride to the hotel. Again, taxis were trying to charge about 5 times more than they should but we managed to negotiate down to double the price it should have cost. Today we had a look out into Beijing. The streets are clean and the pollution isn't half as bad as we'd anticipated; I guess it's far worse in the summer heat. The ...

Again, just a short one to say we're now in China. Will hopefully update site with Mongolia stuff in the next couple of days.

More joyous border crossings Yesterday we wandered around and took in a couple of museums and although Mongolia was an interesting place we are glad to be moving on. This morning we had an early start again as our train to Beijing was at 8:05am. This time we were sharing a cabin with 2 French ladies; Sophie and Sylvie from Rouen of all places! At 7.30pm we arrived at the Mongolian border. More customs forms were distributed and once again our passports were li...

In the country We have spent the last 3 days on a trip into the countryside. Bimba, the hostel keeper arranged a guide and driver to take us to Kharkhorin, the ancient capital city. We were warned that some of the roads were 'bad' this turned out to be somewhat of an understatement. Anyway, driver was called, to us anyway, 'Driver' and the guide was 'Baggy' who looked all of 14. Me, Matt, Baggy, Driver and 67 flies headed out of UB in a Russian minivan and we a...