Back to China. We returned to Beijing to meet up with our tour. This turned out to be one of the highlights of the trip. As you would expect everyone was a little shy on first meeting but we soon became good friends and this continued for the remainder of the trip.

Beijing is big, congested, polluted and under construction, especially the big ticket items that are covered and being repaired for the games in 2008. Above is the Temple of Heaven and it was one of the few places that had been finished and was not packed with other tourists. The trip in Beijing included the Summer Palace, Forbidden city, Ming tombs (approach only) and the Great Wall. It was interesting to see the difference between my previous visit in 1978 and now. As you can imagine the Forbidden city was packed, unlike my first visit when there were only the 14 of us and we had 5 hours to wonder around without supervision. This Forbidden City trip was the express visit in one and a half hours. CITS also manage to inflict a Pearl factory, Silk Factory, Jade factory assorted temples, museums and the "Knock Off" Market, most of which could happily have been missed and the extra time spent seeing something worthwhile.

The Hutong area of Beijing was very interesting and is probably the only old area left intact in the entire city. The maze of backstreets, lakes and small shops was well worth spending some time exploring - maybe next time.

Next stop the warriors in Xian