Beijing
Jun 15 2018 - Jun 22 2018
Mongolia, China
2462 km
Since we already took the Trans-Siberian train, why not take the Trans-Mongolian railway too?
Said and done, we booked a train from Ulaanbaatar to Beijing. This time super splurge first class, richer style.
Views of the Gobi desert from inside the train:
Camels in the distance:
Passing some villages:
Crazy sandstorm:
First impressions of China:
Arrival in Beijing. Pretty crazy to go from the most sparsely populated country in the world to one of the most densely populated areas in the world:
Rental bike piles:
Some festivities, possibly because of the dragon boat festival:
Exploring the city with Boris from Gouda. We met him in Ulaanbaatar and took the same train to Beijing:
Watching football in a nice little restaurant with homebrew beer:
We also did some touristing. Here we are visiting the summer palace. It’s a bit like a theme park without the rollercoasters.
The weather was not cloudy, what you see is just the smog:
Luckily, we found some areas inside the park that were not so crowded, where you could find some ruins of older parts of the palace:
Watching football again, this time with a proper beer tower:
After 4 days of public holidays, we finally got our bicycles back. The procedure of getting them back was pretty quick. We won’t go into detail about all the customs declarations we had to do on the Mongolian side, but it was quite kafkaesque:
More city exploring:
More touristing, this time at the Great Wall in Badaling:
We walked on the wall for about 5km, and it was pretty exhausting. Many parts were really steep:
Beijing at night:
Now the important stuff: Food!
Spicy marinated dried fish with sesame:
Beef noodles with pak choy:
Red bayberries:
Noodles with sesame broth:
Grilled squids on a stick:
Left: Bings filled with pak choy, spring onions and sesame. Right: Donkey sandwiches.
Chicken foot, cooked in a spicy marinade:
Left to right: Mantou, sweet pastries filled with bean paste, winter melon, Lao Beijing Suannai drink yoghurt, Tsingtao beer.
Lamb noodles:
Donkey soup:
Last but not least: A gallery of the crazy electric vehicles that roam the streets of Beijing:
