With our passports stamped after an hour at the Chinese immigration we skuttled back to our new shiny train (one without rats!)

We settled down into our new train along with a nice Mongolian man for the next 36 hours train journey to Beijing. The journey, surprizingly went very quickly. We slept, read and looked out of the window at the Chinese country side passing us by. 2 days later at around 2pm on 3rd November we finally arrived in Beijing. We made our way off the train, had our bags scanned and ventured out for the first time into China. From the train station we got a taxi to a hotel called Far East International Youth Hostel. This was our first experiance of how hard China would be. No one speaks any English and it is proved very difficult to even get the taxi driver to understand where he was to take us. In the end he has to radio through to the woman in his Taxi control and she had to speak to us over the radio.

It was a nice hotel with Dorm accomodation in the basement (not as bad as it sounds) it was down a small dirt track off a main road right in the middle of urban Beijing living, there were locals cooking food n the street using camp stoves, ladys knitting scarfs to sell in their shops and seeling fruit from their stalls, dogs running around playing the dust and men working in their suits on paving a new road?

On arrival into our dorm room we dropped down our things and went for a wonder through Beijing to get our barrings. We had just turned out of our road and turned the corner when we saw a couple with backpacks on their backs looked very tired and sorry for themselves. They asked if we spoke English and on our reply they looked like they could have cried with relief. They had just arrived from the UK to start their 10 months world trip, like us they had got into a taxi and had problems explaining where they wanted to go, the taxi driver drove around aimlessly until he got bored then then stoppped in the middle of Beijing and told them to get ut (basically because he couldnt be bothered) the poor couple then wandered around for 2 hours with their big bags trying to ask people the directions for their hotel but to no avail so when they saw us and asked if we knew where The Far East International Youth Hostel was and we actually knew they nearly wet themselves with excitement.

Having walked with the couple and helped them back to the htel with their things we set out on our walk around Beijing again. We had only been walking for around 20minutes when we stumbled across Tian'naman Square, having found it we kept walking, saving it for when we could do the Forbidden City aswell.

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