White Blazes 6 (Beauty Spot and more Winter)

Beijing Zoo (北京博物馆)

A day at the Beijing Zoo back in January.

The Great Wall at Jinshanling (金山岭)

Getting to and from the Jinshanling section of the Great Wall wasn't easy and I must admit I was a little nervous of being stranded out there almost 100 miles from the city.We bought tickets from the Sihui long distance bus station (四惠长途汽车站) bound for Chengde (承德). Now jinshanling is a long ways out from Beijing, much further then I realized and the bus took the slow route trying to pick up more passengers along the way. We road the bus for 4 hours or something before the bus driver finally dropped us at the turn off for the place. From there it was still 2 and a half miles to the entrance, and even though we had tried to get an early start, it was nearing 4 o'clock and the sun was quickly sinking in the sky. Luckily a little van drove by and for 20 yuan we hitched a ride to the main entrance. The place was nearly deserted aside from a ridiculously drunk Australian man (or at least that's what his accent sounded like to me) shouting curse words at the Chinese people trying to help him. All the gate employees were staring and laughing and one remarked "he's drunk" to me as I paid for the tickets. we then booked it up to the wall racing against daylight still not exactly sure how to get back. Unfortunately we were only able to spend about 30 minutes atop the wall despite the 8 plus hours round trip it took traveling. But the internet did not lie in stating that this place was far better then the Badaling (八达岭) and other super touristy sections. Plus our late arrival was oportune for the evening light. The sight was gorgeous and we were perfectly alone to enjoy it.

On our way out we mistakenly took the wrong path and out of concern for time ended up crawling down a path carved by water run off. Once we passed through the exit we started walking down the road munching on a few crackers I had the foresight enough to buy at pit stop the bus had made. About ten minutes into it I was able to flag down another car, I tried to bargain but ended up paying another 20 yuan to get to the end of the road. There, for 30 more yuan, they convinced me to drive to a nearby town where they said flagging down a bus would be easier. After trying to persuade me to pay them another 400 yuan to drive all the way to the city they dropped us just inside the boarder of Beijing proper in a place called Gubeikou (古北口), no where near actual Beijing City mind you. Here we waiting for about an hour an a half warding off shady mini vans trying to get our business and watching darkness slowly set in. That 400 yuan wasn't sounding so bad about then and my girlfriend wasn't looking too happy, but eventually a bus came and for just over 100 yuan the two of us made it back to our hotel safe and sound.

Sun Island

Romulus and Remus




The sign on this one said Christopher Columbus, I like the sharks chasing after him.


This is what the sculptures start out as.



















The next day we went to another place called Sun Island (太阳岛). Here they had an array of snow sculptures that were pretty impressive but many of the works were yet to be completed. The theme had something to do with Italy, as there were Italian flags on the drive in but I couldn't really figure out the connection between some of them. We ended up wandering through the north end of the park too. There weren't any sculptures there, but there also weren't any people, and the landscape was beautiful covered in snow.

Ice and Snow World

The following night we got tickets to the Ice and Snow World across the river. We bought them at the hotel and it included a tour bus that picked us up at the front door. It seemed a bit pricey, but I'm not really sure, but the tour was full so it seemed like the way to go. Anyways this was the big thing we had been planning to see so it didn't really matter. The parking lot to this place was filled with buses; it was quite a contrast to the empty tourist sites we went to in Datong. At first the place didn't seem very big but it kept on going and going. We had about 4 hours to roam around, which was pretty long to be out in the cold (it was somewhere in the vicinity of -15˚F). We covered almost ever inch of the park, found an ice maze, several ice slides, a ski slope, a hot air balloon, some kinda of cheesy performance with robot backhoes, a party yurt, ice skating bikes, white yaks, and we somehow even ended up walking through the back end of the place. Our scarfs became frozen stiff and we had frost on our eye lashes and hair, so we dipped into a little cabin coffee shop to warm up. When we returned to the bus we found the whole group waiting for us but they just laughed as we got on board. All in all the sculptures where pretty impressive and we had a good time, but man was it hard keeping my camera batteries warm all night.