Navigating Beijing

Beijing is an incredible city. Although somewhat in flux at the moment. With the amount of building, cleaning, restoration and redesign going on anyone would think the Chairman himself is due to rise from the dead...suffice it to say that it is an all out effort to make the city shiny and new for the olympics in August.

All of this is fascinating to watch. The building work goes on round the clock, there are bubble wrapped ticket machines and swipers in the tube stations to replace the two people currently on duty and streets are being developed all over. Aside from being a fascinating spectacle, this makes navigation a NIGHTMARE. Most of the street signs are in pinyin (romanised version of Mandarin) as well as Mandarin, but there's no AtoZ of Beijing. Tourist maps don't really exist, there are no iSites to plunder for information.

This basically means you find your way around in taxis, there are taxi books with common destinations in them in English and Mandarin which you can use to direct the taxi driver by pointing. If your destination isn't in the taxi book you have to go somewhere near and then walk or call someone who speaks English and knows where you are going and have them direct the taxi driver in Mandarin.

Alternatively if, like Emma, you have no idea whatsoever where a particular embassy is you walk and walk and walk and walk a bit more and pick up scraps of paper where people have written the names down for you and pester the guards and anyone else who happens to be passing to see if they know where you're trying to get to. Only problem is most people haven't heard of Azerbaijan....

So it took me 4 days just to locate the 4 embassies I needed - comedy. In that time I have also managed to get visas for Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Two down, two to go...

In my wanderings I have also managed to take in some of the sights, below is a view of the Forbidden City and the city to the south on a relatively clear day, pollution haze gets much worse than this.

More of my sightseeing adventures later.

Craig - am pleased to hear I have 5 Bridges stamp of approval (albeit unofficial, will table a motion for official approval when I return). In the meantime I'll keep my eyes peeled for any schools or Soviet style boot camps (!) that might provide twinning opportunities. In answer to your question I'll be in Beijing for about another week sorting out visas. The velo should (fingers crossed) arrive on Monday - whether I will be able to find the depot where I have to pick it up is another question entirely (that navigation thing again...) and I should be in the saddle sometime around the 11th or 12th of March.