Day 39 – Beijing

First stop this morning was to join the masses of admirers who queue every morning to see Chairman Mao lying in his mausoleum. I'm sure there is a joke in here somewhere about having frozen dictators but I'll be buggered if I can find it, perhaps it's the Chinese Miss World heats that are on TV – it's very distracting.

Battling the truly awful Beijing traffic we head to the North of the city to visit the The Summer Palace. The Summer Palace? They have the audacity to call it The Summer Palace? If I had a lake that was 2km wide and frozen solid I would think about giving it a different name. I watched with mounting anticipation and relish as more and more people went onto the ice and started jumping up and down upon it – I assume these would be the same people who whilst cruising at 35,000 feet would think 'I wonder what would happen if I open this door?'. Unfortunately for me, you and Jeremy Beadle who would have received my film clip the ice steadfastly refused to swallow these fools as it so rightly deserved to do – is there no justice?

The Palace itself was fantastic.

We then visited the worst tourist attraction in Beijing, perhaps China. On paper it seemed great; 'Beijing's Underground City – a unique cold war era underground labyrinth, built deep enough to withstand a nuclear blast'. The advertisement was as good as it got, in reality it was one huge tunnel with a few doors along the length, none of which you could go into. So all we ended up doing was walking along a single corridor for about 2km whilst a guide pointed at sporadic metal doors saying 'Behind this is hospital', 'Behind this is Cinema'.  I got the feeling we were being duped in a big way.

Later that night we went out into the rapidly falling temperature to watch a Kung Fu show, unfortunately, it was a bit too much of a 'show' and not enough Kung Fu for my liking. The action was good, but if you wanted to see loads of blokes getting smashed around the head with planks of wood and kicked in the guts you would have seen more action in a pub on the Old Kent Road and got a decent curry on the way home.

So far, I have counted 7,145,938 bicycles in Beijing.