Day 3 – Hutong Tour and the Summer Palace

Today started off at a very relaxed pace – collected at 10am, and taken just a short car journey to the start of the Hutong Tour.  The Hutong, which as I mentioned, is the district of small alleyways that made up old Beijing.  At their peak in the 1950’s, there were about 6,000 of these small alleyways, but with new developments, there are now down to about 1,000 and some of the locals are trying to have them declared a World Heritage area.  Having now spent 3 days in Beijing, they are definitely the character full centre of the city.  As a city of 23 million people, it is a never ending stream of high rise apartments, offices and hotels that disappear off into the smog that envelopes the city.

Our Hutong tour was conducted on a rickshaw, and although the district is flat, even the smallest of incline had our wee rickshaw boy out of the seat pushing on the pedals to get us up the incline.  We also had an English speaking guide, Vivian, who cycled along beside us to provide us with a commentary about the district.  The Hutong District has a big-ish lake running through the middle of it, and we were being ridden along the side of it.  In the park beside the lake, were the locals doing their Tai-Chi, playing games, preparing to go for a swim.  The swimmers are called the polar bear club, because they swim all year round, and in the winter have to break the ice on the surface of the lake in order to swim in it.  They apparently bring a large bottle of fresh water with them every day to wash with after their swim because the quality of the water in the lake isn’t great.

First stop was at the Prince’s Palace, which had beautiful gardens and a stream, before going on to a tour of the drum tower, where we saw the benefit of paying for a guide, as we were there just in time to see a demonstration of the drummers, drumming at the top of the tower (see photos).  Getting up to the Bell Tower was one very steep set of stairs – 69 stairs going straight up to the top of the tower. 

Vivian our guide was able to take us to one of the local Hutong houses, and what a surprise that was.  All these little houses in the tiny little alleys, are in reality just a dowdy exterior for a courtyard enclosing house with 4 bedrooms for the 7 people who lived there.  Although the house seemed modest, the occupants were obviously very wealthy, as they had a single story residence in central Beijing, and the lady of the house knew about New Zealand, because she had been on holiday there.

After the house visit, our poor rickshaw boy was responsible for riding us back to the start point of the tour.  When we had started, we were the only rickshaw on the road, and we cruised along at a gentle pace.  On the return journey, after 2 and a bit hours, all the short tour bus tours were out and about, so we were forever being overtaken by other rickshaws with their occupants hurrying to get back to catch the bus.  Apparently all the rickshaw boys are from the country because the Beijing residents consider it beneath them to ride a rickshaw.

Lunch was once again an excellent meal, with Michael taking us to a 5 star hotel restaurant.  When we left the hotel, we found to our amazement that about 5 of the hotel cleaning ladies were out on the top of the glass veranda roof at the front of the hotel, with mops, window cleaning blades and polishing cloths cleaning it.  There was not a safety harness in sight, and their focus seemed much more on carrying on their conversation than worrying about not falling off the front of the veranda.  (See photos)

After lunch we headed off to the Summer Palace, which as the name suggests is where the emperor and his entourage spent their time in the summer.  This was their place to relax and escape the stresses of court life in Beijing.  The drive out to the Summer Palace was a reasonable distance, and saw us driving through the outskirts of Beijing, and the mile after mile of high rise apartment buildings.  It was a smoggy day, so we could only see a couple of them before they disappeared off into the smog.  Even our driver seemed to be suffering a bit from the smog, and the journey out there was reasonably uninspiring.

The Summer Palace by contrast was beautiful, set in about 700 acres, of which a large portion was a lake, the palace itself was a long series of buildings down one side of the lake.  After the buildings, we walked down the long covered walkway, called the Long Corridor, which is all decorated with paintings all the way along it.  At the end of the Long Corridor is the large Buddhist Temple of the Sea of Wisdom which looks over the Summer Palace and the lake.  We had to climb what seemed like a thousand stairs to get up to the Temple, but it did offer a great view over the summer palace and the lake.  The Summer Palace Tour ended with a boat ride on the lake, which gave us an alternative view of the Temple and the Long Corridor.  The Summer Palace has quite a history, most of it bad, with it being torched by invaders during the Opium Wars, and then refurbished constantly by the increasingly out of touch Monarchy, who preferred to spend money on their palace, rather than on much needed improvements and re-arming of their Navy.  Our guide told us that the Navy was so depleted that  3,000 British Navy soldiers had triumphed over the Chinese Navy at one stage of the Opium Wars

From there it was another visit to a factory, this time a Pearl Factory.  The factory visits are educational, and there is no pressure to buy anything, although I do feel sorry for the girl who gets assigned to us, because once she’s done her little spiel about whichever product is being sold, she then has to follow us around and try and sell to us, when we are obviously not that interested in buying anything.  Anyway, we’ve bought a couple of small things that we like, but nobody is retiring on their commission from our purchases.

On our way to dinner, which was Peking Duck – the local specialty, we stopped at the Olympic Park to see the Bird’s Nest.  This would have to the busiest place we have been to, so far, and all the people there were locals.  This and the Ice Cube, the Olympic aquatic centre right beside it, are a huge source of national pride, and our guide waxed lyrical about how wonderful it is.  We didn’t get to go inside it, but got to view it from the concourse, along with the thousands of local tourists, street hawkers selling all range of things.  Kites are of course big in China, we see them everywhere we go, and this would have to be the most popular item on sale.  The kites were long strings with little square boxes every few feet that streamed off into the air.  They looked quite impressive, but being bereft of ideas of what we would do with a kite after the initial 3 minute novelty wore off, we decided not to buy one.

Dinner was the famous Peking Duck, before heading back to the sanctuary of our hotel, for a well-deserved shower and collapse into bed after a long days sightseeing.