As we got off the train in Beijing we had come to the end of our Trans-Mongolian train adventure, travelling approximately 6,000 miles, spending seven nights on a train and stopping in seven different cities in Russia and Mongolia on the way (St Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Olkhon Island, Ulaanbaatar, Beijing).

After this epic adventure, we were finally in China, we had some worries about our VISA but we were waved in with minimal interactions at the border. After visiting so many countries we had a pretty good routine when entering a new one:

• Grab some cash from an ATM using one of our cards which has zero overseas fees and uses the Mastercard exchange rate (Halifax Clarity Credit Card, Monzo Card, Starling Card)
• Find a SIM card for our mobile phones (for data more than anything else!)
• Use the Uber/Grab to hail a cheap taxi to take us to our accommodation (we already knew that in China, instead of Uber/Grab we’d need to use their equivalent, called Didi)

The process typically involves buying a SIM card from one of the multiple shops located immediately around the point at which tourists flood into the country, withdraw money from the ATM located in the same area, hit a couple of buttons on our mobile and walk over to the Uber/Grab pickup point so we can be whisked safely to our accommodation.

How the process worked out for us in China:

• Try to use half a dozen ATM machines with four different bank cards, with all transactions being declined for unspecified reasons, so give up on that temporarily
• Not find any shops selling mobile SIM cards at the station, so trek around Beijing in the midday sun for three hours (after spending more than 24 hours on a train). During this process go to multiple tourist information centres, into multiple mobile phone shops and talk to multiple local Beijing residents and end up no closer to buying a SIM card (or at least one which actually works in our phone) than when we started
• Eventually, find somewhere with free Wi-Fi and use that to request a Didi to our accommodation (as we were not willing to risk another St-Petersburg-gate incident where taxis attempt to charge £100 for a 15-minute ride).

So whilst we weren’t off to a perfect start, we were at least on our way to our accommodation, well, as it turns out, no we weren’t. Tired and hungry we turned up at the accommodation reception and gave them our booking name, however, they said we do not have a booking with them, a simple mistake they can surely resolve for us? Well, if it was their mistake they probably would, but we had gone to the right hotel chain, but the wrong location (or more precisely, Didi had taken our accommodation name and presented us with a single result which we happily clicked on to arrange our ride). So back into a second Didi taxi, we were finally on our way to the correct location (incidentally going nearly all the way back to where we started in the process). So with our bumpy start behind us, things were now looking up, well, speaking of bumpiness being behind us, whilst we were waiting at some traffic lights, a police car ploughed into the back of us at speed, causing Steve to bang his head and immediately feel sick and leaving us both feeling traumatised. Neither the police officer driving the car, or the four policemen at the side of the road seemed the slightest bit interested in what had happened, and it wasn’t until Gemma got out and started photographing the number plate of the police car did the officer come over and apologise (after realising we are overseas tourists presumably). Our driver didn’t seem to want to say anything, despite his car being dented and continued the journey as soon as he possibly could. Once we arrived at the accommodation, away from the policeman in question, he asked if we could send him our photos, he was obviously worried about making a complaint in public in front of multiple police officers about what had happened. We were relieved to finally be at our destination, a quirky little hotel, with a retro theme running throughout.

After this exhilarating entry into the country, we needed some rest, which proved to be a little trickier than we expected. We did eventually manage to get a SIM card so we could access the internet, however the only way to do this involved buying a cheap Chinese mobile phone, so we bit the bullet and did that, after that we wanted to use Google Maps, Google Translate, WhatsApp, Facebook and a plethora of other services which we are used to using on a day-to-day basis. How foolish we were, all of these services are blocked in China, so we had to spend an afternoon working out how to install a VPN onto the phone which lets us access the services as if we were outside of China (we opted for VyprVPN which we didn’t have any problems with). With that set up, we were able to use Google Maps to help navigate us around, however we hit the next problem that lots of places haven’t bothered adding themselves to Google Maps (why would they bother, when most Chinese people are not able to access Google Maps), however there were some places on there, so we found a restaurant that appealed to us and headed there, our Didi took us to the road, and we got out with Google Maps at the ready to find the restaurant on the street. Our next lesson was that Google Maps works more or less anywhere in the world, one place it doesn’t work so well is China. Firstly China has laws against mapping out the streets, secondly anything that is mapped in China (via some official Government source) has to be mapped in a special format not used elsewhere, well actually it is used one other place, the planet Mars, and this choice of mapping system means there being inaccuracies when viewed in say Google Maps, so you can get to within about half a kilometre of where you want to go, but doing any better than that is pretty much impossible. This may all sound unbelievable (unless you have experienced it first hand), but if you are so inclined, you can read more about it here.

By using the old-fashioned method of paper maps, and tracking down door numbers, we found the restaurant address we were looking for, which is where we were taught our next lesson: a lot of the places on Google Maps are basically fake entries. From what we can work out, it appears that small little home run restaurants have worked out if they put a marker on Google Maps which indicates they are a fresh, healthy, vegetarian, Western restaurant, tourists will head to the location, and perhaps some of them will give up on their original choice and go into the little home run restaurant instead. To stand any chance of finding what you want, you need to find the official website of wherever it is you wish to go, from there find out their location, then use Didi/Google Maps to get within 500m and then track it down on foot and just hope that the official website had the correct address and that outlet in question is actually open and not coming soon which will potentially be displayed as a graphical banner over the store, in Chinese (and as it is a graphic, not text, Google Translate doesn’t automatically translate it). If all goes wrong, you can just eat at the trick restaurant you have been lured towards, only when you get inside there may be nothing but Chinese menus, no one speaking English, and food that seems to mainly consist of bone, fat and gristle – not at all resembling the delicious delicacies that we call Chinese in the UK.

We did, of course, head over to Tiananmen Square.

But a highlight for us was an excursion we booked to see the Great Wall of China, in particular, we went to see the Mutianyu section, which was recommended to us as a section which has been somewhat restored (so it isn’t just a pile of rubble) but not as overrun with tourists as some other sections and boasts impressive views.

It also has a nice cable car to get up.

Good views over the wall.

We enjoyed walking along the wall, but at the same point we didn’t get the impact of visiting a wonder of the world, we suspect this is because a small section of the wall itself isn’t really anything too interesting, what makes the Great Wall standout is the total length of it, and just how much effort it must have taken to build which is hard to appreciate when you are on top of it. Whilst I am sure this is somewhat philistinic to say, the toboggan ride down was one of the highlights for us!

We had planned to do a few more things in Beijing, but after our bumpy start, we needed a couple of days to rest and thankfully our hotel room was reasonably priced and felt like a few days of luxury compared to being on a train for seven nights over the last few weeks. We packed our bags and took a Didi back to the train station to head to our next destination, Xi’an. We joined the security queue but wasn’t allowed through, the guard didn’t speak English but found someone that did, he informed us we were at the wrong station. Beijing has multiple stations, the one we needed was 40 minutes away and our train was due to depart in 30 minutes! This was rather frustrating as we had been so careful in Russia to make sure we go to the right station each time, but hopefully a lesson we can learn from. On the plus side, China has a much better system for dealing with this than the UK; in the UK you would lose your entire fare and have to buy another ticket which would cost a small fortune (as in the UK it is imperative to book long-distance trains in advance to avoid paying 4X the price for a ticket). In China, we were able to get booked onto a train later that evening and only had to pay roughly a 20% cancellation charge on the price of the ticket we had already paid for.

So we ultimately went to the right station, boarded our train and looked forward to seeing Xi’an feeling confident we would have a better introduction there than we did in Beijing!

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