Beijing, PRC (Peoples Republic of China) - Oct 13, 2014

One of China's four ancient capitals, Beijing has been a powerful city for over 3,000 years. During which time, dynasties have come and gone, but this city has protected its important landmarks, such as the Forbidden City, home of the Imperial families and the Temple of Heaven as well as the Summer Palace. This capital of China is home to 25 million people in the greater metropolitan area and is home to not only the county's political center but also to its cultural center. Beijing does not sleep and with this fast paced busy metropolis comes everything larger than life. Our entire city of Vancouver could fit inside one of the many apartment complexes. It would take as many of four of our office towers to fit the floor plate of many of these building - in short everything here is on the huge scale.

From the port it takes over two hours to get into Beijing, so here we did an overnight at one of the hotels in the downtown area. With thanks to our travel agent Carla and our, now friends at Silk Holidays (the second time we have this tour operator) we were picked up by Moko and driver for a wonderful busy two day adventure. We did try to get our previous guide Jerry but could not which turned out okay at the end of the day. Moko did a great job. Funny thing is that our driver is friends with Jerry and while we were in the car Jerry called him and he passed the phone back to me for a quick chat, great to hear is familiar voice. As you can see with one of our pictures (for those who have been following us for the past few years) we did see Jerry after our lunch, his tour did pass by us as we were coming out of our lunch - he stopped his tour to say a friendly hello.

Our two days, day one was to the iconic great wall where this time we hiked up at the Mutianyu Great Wall. This part of the wall is a bit farther away than the area we were three years ago but I would suggest that if you have the time to go here. This is for a few reasons, first up it is less busy and more picturesque, the second is the options, this area has a gondola that can whisk you up and back if you like, third is the option of hiking up or down and or taking the gondola up or down. The fourth option for fun another great way to come down is by the luge run. There were a few hiking options which we opted for hiking up to Tower 8 and then walked along the wall to tower 19 and then for a different perspective took the gondola down. So it was a two and half hour drive to lunch and the Wall then it was down to see the infamous Pandas, which we pick up in part 2 of this upload. BTW - the NBA teams Sacramento Kings and the Brooklyn Nets are here to play a friendly on Wednesday and they were all visiting this portion of the Wall today. We were seeing all this security detail walking around and then amongst them was a really tall guy, I am thinking basketball player here. This is when we learned that they were here, so we took a few photos. What was funny is that they didn't walk together as a group but individually with their own security.