Beijing
3 Mar 2014 | Beijing, China
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Time to visit the capital, Beijing (北京 lit. North capital) here I come! Along the way it really feels like it, the roads become bigger with more traffic, lots of highways coming from all over the country slowly merge one into the other... And after an hour being detained by the police at the checkpoint before the city (something wrong with my passport apprently, but as they couldn't explain me what, they just gave up), I finally arrive in the city!
And what a huge city it is! There I stay with Jay, cool girl that I met in Laos, who give me a few clues about it before disappearing on her busy schedule. My legs are still hurting from my intensive hike in Huashan so I don't walk too much around. Still from what I see, it's an interesting one, with its own identity and people. It's a big cosmopolitan mix of all the country's ethnicity and also foreigners. Wandering around you can feel the pressure of history! The famous Tiananmen square, the biggest square in the world, which is the symbol of revolution is tightly controlled (you cannot even get there without passing a metal detector) probably in fear of a new revolution. I skip the Forbidden City seeing the huge crowd of noisy tourists (it's weekend), and can't see Mao's mausoleum as I wanted to as it's closed.
But the main point of me being there is to experience one of the human-built wonders of this world, the Great Wall of China. And I'm not disappointed, after some reasearch I finally found a place I could easily go which is not destination for the crowd of tourists, and what an amazing hike it is!