Sorry for the Group Email

That’s right, I’m going to dispense with Beijing in a single post. A few reasons for this:

1. Beijing was weeks ago and I’ve forgotten most of what happened.
2. A lot’s happened since then, and I’m in danger of forgetting that as well.
3. Beijing’s huge and to re-tell everything would take too long anyway.
4. It’s my blog.

Lonely Planet reckons Beijing is the size of Belgium. Lonely Planet also thinks that there are more donkeys in Ulan Batar than there are cars, which is just so clearly codswallop I was tempted to write a letter. You’re more likely to be run down by a four-wheel-drive in Ulan Batar than you are to see anything with four legs that isn’t a dog.

That said, Beijing is huge. Colossal, in fact. Ginourmous. Some way north of that, even. It has more than 17 million inhabitants, none of whom, apparently, is capable of drawing a decent map.

We paid 25rmb for our map (a shade under £2), and were rewarded with a flimsy, folding piece of rubbish with no scale on it. It showed, encouragingly, that our hotel was just a few city blocks from Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Great! We thought, happily. We’ll stroll down and be back for tea.

We were not back for tea. Not even nearly. What, on a normal city map, with a normal scale, should have taken 20 minutes, took nearly an hour. By the time we got there on our first day we were parched, tired, and not nearly in the mood to spend the amount of time you need to spend on something like the Forbidden City.

We trudged back.

Don’t get me wrong, though. By the time we arrived in Beijing we were ready for some metropolitan-ness. Ulan Batar, no matter how much of a relief it was to arrive there after Russia, is still dusty and cold. And there’s very little to actually do. When we arrived in Beijing the temperature was nudging the mid-twenties – the warmest we’d been so far – and we were thrilled to be out of our thermals and into just a single layer.

Ten years ago, apparently, Beijing was in the toilet. It smelt and no-one wanted to go there. The Olympics, arriving in just a few months, has been overwhelmingly kind to the city. Billions have been poured in to cleaning up, with the result that most of Beijing, if not the kind of spotless to keep OCD-sufferers happy, is more than clean enough to wander around for days.

The people, though, were the best. They made the friendly inhabitants of Mongolia look like monsters. People waved and shouted hello at us. Children wandered up to stare. More than once in China, total strangers came up to us to help us gawp at our terrible map.

You should, if you find yourself there for a few nights, visit the acrobats. These, for me, were the pinnacle of human physical achievement. They make professional athletes look like a bunch of over-paid, under-talented one-trick ponies. It’s all very well being able to toss a ball through a hoop or similar, but from now on I just can’t respect any athlete who can’t balance on a see-saw while using his feet to flip china cups into his hat. The acrobats were so good, in fact, that we became blasé about the things they were doing.

“A man balancing another man on top of him using just his head?” we though. “Pfah. A minute ago I saw a bicycle with a dozen women balanced on it.”

Then, when you’ve watched the acrobats, you should go an watch the opera. There are three reasons for this. First, the opera boasts the kind of kung-fu that would make Jackie Chan proud, and as such is as near to an adrenalin buzz you’re going to get watching people sing. Second, the actual singing is a bizarrely atonal brand of throat noise, and if that sounds weird it’s because it is. The band plays from the front few rows, which is great. A whole row of heads bobbing up and down in time to the music. The other reason their presence was welcome is that they more or less doubled the total number of people in attendance. The final reason to go, incidentally, is that tickets for each only cost a tenner.

Dave really needs a staff writer to keep things moving. On the strength of Google Ads so far, I can afford to pay about £5 a year. On the plus side, you’d get to carry my bags. More pictures of Beijing in the Flickr set.