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We woke up today, not quite believing this is our very last full day of travelling! We spent a bit of time sorting out our stuff and throwing away lots of clothes, ready to pack our bags for the very last time later today!
We planned to visit the summer palace today, which covers an expanse of 2.9 sq KM, three quarters of which is water. We'd read about a boat that travels along the canals and into the palace, so decided to head to the zoo which is where the boat departs from. However, when we arrived at the zoo we couldn't see any sign of where to get the boat. We wandered around for a while and even tried the tourist information office, which was closed! Time was getting on so we got back on the subway and got off right next to the palace. By the time we got there it was late afternoon and it was closing in a few hours. We bought our tickets and headed inside. The Summer Palace is the largest and most well-preserved royal park in China and was built as a luxurious royal garden for royal families to rest and entertain. It's massive inside, and it would have taken us a full day to explore it fully, but unfortunately we only had a few hours! The last few days in Beijing had worn me out and I was ready for a relaxing stroll around some of the gardens....that was until Dave spotted the pedal boats for hire... So we ended up paddling around the massive Kunming lake for an hour on a massive pedalo that required a lot of leg muscles! It was quite fun though and we waved at the Chinese couples in other pedalos who, as usual, found great amusement in seeing two English people! Running over the lake was the impressive 17-Arch bridge, which we took a lot of photos of for Dr Warick back home! We managed to return our pedalo just in time to get our deposit back and not get charged for an extra hour...although it was touch and go and we had to pedal like the wind to get back to the dock!
As we exited the palace we did something we haven't done for our whole time in Asia...hired a cyclo to take us back to the subway station! There's always loads of them offering rides but we've never taken up their kind offers until now. We took a few photos to mark the occasion! Before getting back on the subway we enjoyed some iced coffees and muffins in McDonald's, while writing a list of all of our journeys (plane, train and automobile) so that we can work out our mileage when we get home.
Back at the hostel we started sorting our stuff out and packing our rucksacks for the last time (sob!) then got ready to go out for our last Chinese supper. We headed back to the area we'd been to a few nights before with lots of bars and restaurants, and decided on a traditional Chinese place where we had to mark menu cards with a marker pen to indicate our choices, then pay up front to the server. We had a feast of wantons, dumplings, noodles, beer and water and the bill came to something stupid like £10 (I can't actually remember how much it was as I'm writing this diary entry 2 months later...). We then went back to the bar we went to last night and toasted our travels with a few cocktails.
It has been such an amazing year and we have seen things we never dreamed we'd see and met some incredible people. We can't quite believe it has come to an end at last, but we have so many memories that we will cherish forever.
We took a taxi back to the hostel and went to bed with a mixture of sadness and excitement about finally going home tomorrow. We just need to remember the awesome quote we saw graffitti'd on the wall of a bar in Siem Reap...'Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened'...
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