Exploring China: Beijing, Shanghai, Pingyao

There are many international flights to Beijing from all over the world, and this is perhaps the best place to start when touring China.

The flight-time from London Heathrow to Beijing with British Airways is about ten hours; a fairly long flight, but bearable and direct. Taxis are readily available at the airport, but pre-arranging a car makes the arrival less traumatic.

We stayed at the Peace Hotel which is hardly luxurious but comfortable, and inexpensive, probably costing about £60 ($100) per night for a double room including breakfast. It is in an extremely good location near many of Beijing's major attractions, with the Forbidden City visible from outside the hotel. There are several new, expensive, luxury hotels near Tiananmen Square which would also act as an ideal base while in Beijing and offer rather more style and luxury albeit at far more expensive "international" prices. We explored a few of them.

The Peace Hotel had little excitement to offer on our first evening so we took a short taxi ride to Raffles Hotel near Tiananmen Square, costing just £0.70. Raffles, while not having the history and character of the original Raffles Hotel in Singapore, did provide a touch of oriental luxury after our long flight, at quite un-Chinese prices, with a "Singapore Sling" costing £5.00 and the smallest Sherry in the world costing £4. Afterwards we walked towards Tiananmen Square and took a rickshaw ride round the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, initially haggling the driver down to £3.50, but ended up foolishly paying £14 because he did a far bigger tour and took us to Beijing Hotel for dinner. The Beijing Hotel is another very new hotel next to Raffles offering a range of restaurants and bars, which, although very luxurious, expensive and pleasant, is really just another international hotel similar to so many around the world, but with a slightly Chinese flavour. The inexpensive Peace Hotel was, for me, a good choice because the posh hotels did have an air of shopping mall about them and I disapprove of paying to go into a shopping mall. Our dinner at the Beijing Hotel was, however, very good. We chose the most oriental looking restaurant there and ordered Peking Duck, which was good, but certainly not the best I had ever had and extremely expensive.

Beijing has a modern, disappointingly western atmosphere about it, with many of the same shops, cafes and restaurant chains as everywhere else and terrible traffic problems. We tried to find local restaurants or bars, but the ones my partner would contemplate eating in were generally quite expensive. We decided to try to find a good bar for an aperitif and after some research and recommendations in out guidebook we took a long and expensive taxi-ride (just one mile away, but we sat in traffic for 45 minutes) to Capone's Italian bar. It turned out to be in yet another modern characterless shopping mall, and the bar was O.K. but distinctly American in style. We did however find a chain of Duck restaurants with huge plastic ducks outside which did produce some extremely good Peking Duck, which was carved in front of us and served by hand in hygienic plastic gloves.

We needed to get to an airport to fly to Xian. A prearranged driver and car arrived at our guesthouse in Pingyao to take us to Taiyan airport. To break the journey we stopped at Shuang Li Temple which is about 30 minutes out of the city, then the historic Jinci Temple which is a huge complex of buildings that date back to about 1030, although mostly more recent or rebuilt. The origins of the site are from several centuries BC. Very interesting architecture. We reluctantly ate in an extremely dirty looking restaurant nearby. We then flew for one hour from Taiyan to Xian with TBC airlines.

Guilin is a fairly large modern city next to a lake and surrounded by the wonderfully weird limestone shapes that have inspired artists for centuries. We stayed in the Bravo Hotel, Guilin, for one night as, like most tourists, we were just there for the river cruise. The Bravo Hotel is located right next to the lake a pleasant walk from Guilin centre, with views of the hills in the distance. The centre of Guilin is very modern with a Louvre style glass pyramid in the central square. There is a good selection of places to eat and drink from expensive business hotels to small bars and restaurants. I found a "German" bar that sold outrageously expensive bottles of beer from around the world.