Day 25

How do you top a day like yesterday? Well, you can't but you can try lots of other interesting stuff, and that's exactly what we did.

In the morning we went to the Yonghe (Lama) Temple, which didn't take long as we're all temple'd out, so it was a quick wander round and a few photos of another Buddha with a tenuous accolade, this time, the world's tallest Buddha carved from a single piece of wood. After that, it was back on the subway, heading South towards the Temple of Heaven. Again, a very pleasant and impressive looking place, but in essence tourists pay to walk around a big park and look at three big towers, which you can't go in to and there is very little information about them. I know it sounds like I'm slating temples but they are advertised as tourist attractions so there should be some decent content to read about them. Instead, every time I go to a temple, all I'm getting out of it is expensive photographs.

After the temples, we picked up our visas for Vietnam and train tickets to Hanoi, and then headed to a street market, where we tried deep fried scorpion and starfish. (Don't believe the pictures? Have a look at the video.) The wasn't much to the scorpions but they were tasty, although I think that might be down to chilli powder. The starfish on the other hand was a different story. Absolutely disgusting, it tasted like tough, chewy, fish-flavoured sand. Don't know how I didn't see that one coming. Never again.