In planning our flight into Vladivostok we stumbled across the Chinese transit visa, which is ideal for a quick stopover.
”Just a couple of days to decompress” was the reasoning, so we signed up for a two-day tour. We admittedly weren’t picturing 38C and 50-60% humidity with 12-15kms on foot each day.
Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City are a touchstone of China’s imperial history and together with the mausoleum of Mao Zedong are a bucket list destination for Chinese tourists.
They can each process 8 million visitors per DAY and our visit, falling in school holidays, was a sellout. The numbers are not quite enough to overwhelm the architecture but by sheer weight went someway to rather explain it.
Next stop from there was a visit to the Great Wall, again a testament to what can be achieved with manpower and organisation.
Day Two centred around a visit to the Summer Palace and Temple of Heaven.
All of these places are I think UNESCO World Heritage sites and jewels in that list. I’m really delighted we made the detour and placed a foundation for our experiences to come as we travel westwards - first through the lands of the warrior shepherds so feared by the Ming dynasty, and then along the path taken as products of China travelled overland to markets in the West.
Notwithstanding all of that, the highlight for mine was our tremendous guide Nancy, from China Travel.
Check out the Beijing gallery for more pics.