Preamble
This blog will be a bit different than those I’ve written in the past in that it is being composed entirely after the trip using the hand-written journal I kept while we were there (I didn’t take a computer and turned my phone off while in China – it’s not paranoid if they’re really after you…).
Also, I can't figure out how to let Donna edit the draft posts so look for her corrections/additions in the comments section.
The plan was a tour that was primarily focused on Donna’s genealogy, visiting the 4 villages that both sets of her grandparents were from. We’ll start with 2 days on our own in Beijing to acclimate to the time change (LA +15 hours), transition into the tour bus mode to visit some of the main tourist attractions – The Great Wall, Tienanmen Square, The Terracotta Army, etc. - go into the genealogy tour mode to prepare for the village visits, visit the villages, and finish the trip off with 3 nights in Singapore. All and all 27 days of airliners, trains, and tour busses. And a lot of Chinese food…
We stuck to the plan…
Day 1-2: Home/Beijing (Thur/Fri; 28/29 Mar)
The first task was to get to the airport. We were going to be gone for almost a month so leaving our car in a parking lot would have been expensive. We used Lyft to Van Nuys Flyaway then on to LAX. That worked well. The next task was to board the airplane for the 17 hour flight to Singapore then the 6 hour flight to Beijing (formerly known as Peking which is why the airport code is PEK...). Here's the great circle route...
|
|
Our takeoff time was 8:50 PM which meant we had to check in at 5:50 PM, standard for international flights. We departed on time (Airbus 350) but 7621 nautical miles and 17 hours, even in "economy plus", makes for a long flight. It doesn't seem like sitting for that long should wear you out but we were beat after the first leg. We arrived in Singapore at 5:30 AM Sunday morning, losing a day because we crossed the international date line. The 3-hour layover in Singapore helped but the 6-hour flight to Beijing (Boeing 777) felt more like piling on. To be fair, the Singapore Airlines crews did what they could to make the flights tolerable, it's just too much airliner flying. We arrived at the Beijing airport at ~ 2:30 PM.
About 30 hours after departing home we found ourselves in Beijing looking for the Didi (China's version of Uber) driver, who found us quickly and drove us to our hotel. Traffic - if you've been to Beijing you know of what I write, it you haven't (like me) the traffic comes across as absolutely INSANE! There are ~20 million people in Beijing, millions of them are driving cars, an equal (or more) number are riding scooters - mainly electric scooters. The car drivers follow some sense of driving rules with regard to lights and lane keeping, but speed limits and lane changing, not so much. Nevertheless, the cars kind of follow some version of rules. For the scooters anything goes! First, there's a zillion of them. Secondly, there are no rules, none that are enforced anyway. The scooters ride everywhere, except on the freeways. By everywhere I mean the streets (any direction), the bike lanes, any sidewalk (30 mph weaving amongst pedestrians), through lights (red lights are meaningless). Oh, and few helmets. Moreover, it wasn't at all unusual to see a mom riding a scooter with a toddler standing in front of her (holding on the handlebars) and small child (but not a toddler) on back. This would be a common sight in every big city we visited in China. INSANE! We made it to the Renaissance Beijing Wangfujing Hotel (RBWH) at about 7:30 PM without getting hit or hitting something else and had dinner at the hotel buffet, which was fine, we were very tired...
An aside regarding traffic: During our entire time in China I saw the results (i.e. after the incident) of a couple of minor fender-bender accidents between cars and/or trucks but not one scooter mishap. I did see dozens of near-accidents involving scooter/scooter, scooter/car, scooter/bus, scooter/pedestrian (I almost got hit by one...) but somehow not one accident/incident - it defies logical observation.
Two views from our 6th story suite at the RBWH. Beijing has hundreds of multi-family, mostly single-story housing structures, called "hutongs", interspersed throughout the city, often bordered by huge buildings (many of them also family housing). They varied significantly in apparent wealth. Many looked like this...
... while a smaller (much smaller) number looked like this...
One more note regarding scooter-mania - all this weaving, racing and riding the wrong way on the wrong side is often done one-handed. The other hand is holding a cell phone that they're looking at while traveling at speed... some pix (that are actually mildly insane relative to what we saw...)...
