Part 1 - splitting this blog into two parts, they should both be available under Beijing though.

Louise left today :-( but I think she would agree with me that Beijing is the most 'alien' of the places we've been to in China so far. Hong Kong was a bit of a soft landing, we didn't see too much of Guilin or Xi'an, and Yangshuo was geared toward extracting the western dollar.

Even getting to Beijing was a problem though. Louise booked flights online from Xi'an - but the agent (recommended by the Rough Guide) waned us to fax copies of both sides of her credit card. Er - no thanks. After a couple of emails, they agreed to let us pay at the airport.

Pity that the airport didn't know that. Luckily we got there early - and about 50 minutes after arriving there (and just before check-in closed), we were finally allowed to buy tickets with cash. Don't ask, I don't know why this should be a problem...

Anyway, we arrived at Beijing airport - and couldn't find the Airport Express train. In proper comical style, all the signs pointed to each other - it turned out that we needed to go down two floors. My theory is that the line is pretty new, and they haven't got all of the new signage in place yet. Louise, when you read this - turns out it's marked pretty clearly from the departures floor, but not from arrivals - duh!

Next hurdle - find the hotel. We had a name and an address, and we knew which subway station it was near - what could go wrong? To shorten a very long story, we arrived at a junction the size of a motorway interchange, with no clue as to which way the hotel was, no Chinese name for the hotel, no directions, no phone number, and no recognition of the English name from the cabbie I asked. Great.

We collared a Ukrainian called Vitali who took us to an internet cafe (same one I'm in now), and managed to find the hotel in not one but two places on Google Maps - super. One of them was actually in the central reservation of the motorway - excellent. We rang them up and somehow managed to walk there - more by gut feel than judgement. Still, it all counts! ;-)

Had a great day in the Forbidden City yesterday - amazing place. Walked for miles and were both absolutely knackered. I've got a great(?) photo of Louise's feet after she'd walked round all day in sandals.

See part 2 for more....