12 – Beijing #2

During the middle of our stay in Beijing we decided to pay Shanhaiguan a visit, which marks the near end of the Great Wall of China. Having visited the far end at Jiayuguan, and walked along a small section in rural Beijing municipality, this truly felt like a completion of the journey.

Naturally, instead of doing the easy thing, I decided to do the complicated thing, and booked us tickets out to Longjiaying (with a short 2 mile walk to the bus stop), and tickets home from Shanhaiguan. We stopped for lunch before the bus, and then made our way to the point where the Great Wall meets the sea. It was admittedly momentous, but mostly roped off.

After that we wandered up through the rest of the Shanhaiguan complex, visiting the First Point Under Heaven (to match the gate in Jiayuguan), a pause among waterlogged pagodas for a birthday call with Mum, and then the Shanhaiguan old town itself. At this point we caved at the sight of a KFC (travelling really will do that do you) before our long train back to Beijing, and some much-needed sleep.

With our last day in Beijing – and China – we started out at the Beijing Art District, 798. Mike took us to this back in 2015 at the start of my time in China (it made sense), and we spent a lovely morning flitting about amongst the installations and trendy shops before heading out into the suburbs to collect our train tickets into Mongolia.

Having planned this trip on a budget I don’t know what I expected, but somehow I was still unnerved by the visit to a clearly-residential area of Beijing, walking into an apartment/office, and picking up the tickets that would take us into Mongolia. Snide comments aside, the tickets were legitimate and the detour was slight in the grand scheme of things, and left the rest of the day to relax before our next step on the journey, into the Trans-Siberian railway.

In the afternoon I showed Evie and Kirsten the Silk Market, still a rabbit burrow packed with vendors of any and all souvenirs you could think of. I already had the sense that haggling was 90% charisma from watching my sister (whom I’d taught a handful of Mandarin numbers with zero context or meaning) succeed in Shanghai, and Evie just reinforced this idea with her instant mastery of the skill. We left with significantly fewer yuan notes and significantly more possessions to bring back to the UK.

Our last night was spent in a hole in the wall for egg and tomato noodles, before our nervous and early start to head out into the Gobi desert, and beyond.