Our first full day in China and we are off to Chengde, which is about 4 hours north of Beijing. Chengde is the Summer retreat in the Mountains. In the early 1700's the Emperor built the worlds biggest garden surrounded by 8 temples overlooking the palace and lake complex. Pictured above is one of the temples.

Chengde is still an exciting place to visit as its not on the tourist lists yet and most visitors to the city are bused in and out without have much interaction with the local inhabitants. We had four full days to explore the gardens, temples and the city. The gardens are huge and it takes all day to do a tour which consists of a 20 minute bus ride around the perimeter. The gardens are split into 3 sections to represent the different areas of china. The Plains, the forest and the mountains. The plains were stocked with deer so the emperor and his friends could go hunting - YES they are that big. The temples surround the complex and are simply amazing. Changing in style from Tibetan to Circular and everything in between.

The people are very friendly and go out of their way to welcome you into there city. The restaurants are great. We stumbled through several wonderful meals. In particular was the Seafood around the corner from our hotel. We dined on fresh scallops, fish, lobster (all live from the tanks) and fantastic slow cooked venison and all for $30. It took us 2 days to instruct the staff on how to open a bottle of wine and in the end they were a wiz at it. That also implies we had a glass or two LOL. The other good place was "The Lucky Cow" (or unlucky depending on which side of the chopstick you were on). We started off ordering what we thought was a Beef casserole and a spicy lamb dish. We had a bit of difficulty with the ordering so the owner presented himself at the table fully equipped with his five words of English. Between him and our being "fluent in finger pointing" we got the message through. The first dish arrived and we dived in, not realising that what looked like cherry tomatoes were actually Chillies. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH - Beer, more Beer and lots more beer. Once we got our taste buds back the meal was great. More pics and tales soon.