Countries visited: 16 including Australia (14 if you don’t count Hong Kong and Macau). Compared to 2006 I missed out Japan and Cambodia, but included Macau, Italy, the UK, New Zealand, and Taiwan.
Total flights:106 (compared to 2006 total of 99)
Total miles: 175194 mi (compared to 2006 total 167484 mi)
Details are in this post. Same password as normal - email me if you don’t have it.
After getting over the shock of Friday’s near loss of passport, I had a great weekend around Beijing. First of all, English is not widely spoken - probably the least of any major places I’ve ever visited - so having a Mandarin-speaking friend is a big bonus. Actually maybe “first of all” should be the pollution barrier, which you encounter before the language barrier. It really does just sit in the air everywhere - I’ve never seen anything like it.
Because I will be spending the subsequent 8 or 9 days with an Intrepid guided tour, and seeing the major touristy sites there, I wanted to see some of the more out of the way places of Beijing on the weekend.
One of the interesting things I hadn’t heard of before was the existence of Hutons, which are apparently collections of accommodations forming mini communities. Quite amazingly, some really old ones exist quite close to the center of Beijing - although it would be a safe bet that they will fall to the urbanisation of Beijing. It’s quite a sight to see the roads and sidewalks being rebuilt kilometer by kilometer.
Saturday night I was really impressed by the nightlife - some great bars and at great prices! This even included a “hole in the wall” lounge-type bar in the middle of a Huton.
Sunday I saw a couple of great places. The first was known as 798 Art Zone, which was full of some great painting/photo/sculpture displays and some nice cafes. According to Wikipedia it’s been scheduled for destruction since 2004 or 2005, but I’m not sure how it’s managed to stave off gentrification.
The second great place was Jingshan Park. The park has a temple on top of a hill that overlooks the Forbidden City. Due to the pollution, only really the rooftops of the city were visible, which made it look like some kind of ancient Chinese city with the mist at dawn (although the mist was somewhat brown in colour). The second nice part of the park was that it was filled with hundreds of Beijing residents, mostly older ones, standing around singing and dancing in groups of between 5 and 50. These people were belting out the tunes, and some guys even brought along their own microphone and portable speaker so they could be heard above the sound of everyone else!
Unfortunately, I didn’t think to take my camera with me on either day, so no photos here.
Series of steps:
- Arrived in Beijing around midday Friday
- Taxied to a hotel to have lunch with a colleague and leave luggage
- Taxied to a third-party office for a meeting
- Two hour meeting
- Taxied back to lunch hotel to collect luggage
- Taxied to my real hotel for the weekend
- Upon arrival, discovered my travel document wallet (including passport) was missing - including USD notes, Euro travelers cheques, aVISA card, and every airline and hotel membership card I had
Having traveled so much in the past few years, I’d become complacent and didn’t even have a photocopy of my passport handy, nor the numbers of my travelers cheques written down, etc (in case you’re wondering, the cheques are still left over from my trip to Europe 4 years ago).
The hotel actually wouldn’t/couldn’t let me check in without a passport, which made things worse. They had to phone the police station to report the loss, but things got worse because the police couldn’t find a record of my visa to enter the country - because I didn’t have one. The reason was that I was travelling on an APEC Business Travel Card which allows you to come and go without a visa - but of course that card was missing too. So the police kindly requested the hotel to escort me to the police station for “questioning”.
The hotel guy kept asking he about my steps and reminded me three different times to “tell the truth” to the police guys when they questioned me. We arrived and waited for the police chief to be available (I worried about how long that was going to take) before my colleague who I’d had lunch with and attended the meeting with phoned to say that my wallet had been found in the meeting room we’d been in (a lucky break, as it was 7pm by this time). What was then strange was that the police still didn’t want to let me leave as they didn’t believe me! Eventually things were sorted and I was allowed to go and my colleague arrived an hour later, having picked up my passport.
So, touch wood, I am still lucky to have had nothing majorly bad happen to me after all this travel. Except for last week when I lost or had my iPod nano stolen in India 