Everything about China is big. It's the world's most populous country at 1.3 billion people, it has a 4,000 year old civilization and it has the world's second biggest economy (America is the biggest).
There's a ton of things to see and lots of ground to cover so we booked a two week tour to make the most of our time in China. We were out of brainpower after so much travelling on our own so we were looking forward to an organized tour where no thinking was required. The tour would make sure we wouldn't ...
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| Sleep away the days |
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| Miss any meals |
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| Fall on our heads |
We were thrilled to have our good friends Russ and Sue join us. They're avid travellers like us so we knew we'd have plenty of fun trekking through China.
The four of us arrived in Beijing a day before our tour began and we used the time to visit the Beijing Zoo. The stars of the zoo are the giant pandas. They were very active and very cute.
After we dragged ourselves away from the pandas, we explored the rest of the zoo and we were disappointed with what we saw. Lots of the enclosures for other animals were small prison cells of concrete and glass with nothing to make them more natural environments. It was a stark contrast to the modern and large enclosures that the pandas enjoyed.
Our second stop was Yonghe Temple. It's one of the largest and most important Tibetan Buddhist temples in the world. Unfortunately, this is as close as we'd get to Tibet as there weren't any stops in Tibet on our China itinerary.
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| One of the temple buildings |
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| Worshippers outside one of the temple buildings |
We also got to experience three rides in Beijing taxis. The taxis had nothing in common with their clean and well maintained Japanese counterparts. The taxis are in poor shape - it's amazing they even run. One was still chugging away even though all of its dashboard warning lights were on.
We were now warmed up for our China adventures and ready for our tour to get started tomorrow. Stay tuned for more from Beijing!
Vanessa and Blake
