Quite a busy couple of days - with weary legs we decided to have a bit of a lay-in (are you detecting a pattern yet?) but made it to Liu Luang for the afternoon. This is basically one long street full of olden-style shops, it was a real relief from the concrete jungle of Beijing and we spent at least a couple of hours browsing the stalls. Following some good natured bargaining we managed to acquire a Mah Jong set, two seals (of the ink/wax variety not furry club-able creatures) with our names on (one for Jen with a dragon on it (her birth year) and mine had a rabbit...hmmmm no comments around appropriateness.....(I'll get a slap for that!)), a painting and a small magnified micro-picture - kind of like the 'your name on a grain of rice'... With all the SARS worries and everything we thought we'd get the painting of the old man representing longevity...oh the irony...

Last night we went for a drink and meal at the Belgium bar we went to before and struck up a conversation with a couple of Spaniards (their best mate who arrived later was called Manuel - no kidding...he wasn't from Barcelona though...) who seemed like a great laugh - Jen got on really well with Sandra whilst I spent my time with John (he was born in London hence John not Juan...) All was going swimmingly until the topic of 'The War' cropped up and this guy starting talking out of his large Spanish arse. 'The war is justified' 'Saddam Hussein is worse than Hitler' 'Bush is an excellent President' etc etc...to compound matters on further probing the war was justified solely because they control the 2nd largest reserves of oil in the world and it shouldn't be under their control who gets it, no mentions of anything else - just oil. Needless to say he's not on our Christmas card list and his better half (who apologised for him about 30 times) kept giving him worse and worse looks as the night went on...let's hope when they got back to the flat she dumped him - unlikely but would make a great end to the story. Either way as I said Jen and Sandra got on really well and we're destined to meet up in Madrid on our final leg sometime in December/January. Let's hope Senor Ignorant isn't around...

This morning - none the worse for our debate last night - we arose relatively early and made a trip to The Summer Palace. This was the place where the Emperors and their hangers-on (concubines/eunachs et al) retired in the Summer (duh!) when it was too hot to be in the city. It is spread over about 20 square kilometres and is capped by a magnificent lake and a huge temple that is built on the cliffs above it. Again, the architecture is exceptional and all the long corridors and ceilings are covered in ornate patterns and pictures depicting the Ming and Qing reigns. Never ones to shirk a challenge we decided to hire a pedalo and duely, er, pedalo-ed around the lake - no mean feat given that it's about 3 Km long/wide and we only had an hour. For some reason Jen seemed better at the peddling aspect whereas I was clearly the better 'steerer'...

Our final port of call in Beijing was The Temple of Heaven Park, in which is the temple you'll see on jars of Tiger Balm and thousands of other products. Again, absolutely magnificent and worth a couple of hours of anyone's time.

After arriving back at the hotel we have spent a couple of hours sorting through all the photos from the past 4 weeks but, alas, they don't have an imaging program here so we can't resize them and upload them - hopefully they will in our next destination. We are on the move again tomorrow - a flight to Xi'an, which is most famous as being the home to the Terracotta Warriers, which again should mean a fantastic few days.

No or little news as yet on the SARS situation in HK from the Foreign Office so we're going to have to wait before deciding on where to go from Xi'an. Another option we are considering is to fly from Chengdu to Bangkok via Thai Airways rather than return to HK. This would enable us to get to Leshan (the Big Buddha) and to go to the Panda Sancturay (just outside Chengdu) but would mean we'd have to miss the Yangtze cruise. To date everyone we've spoken to said the water has risen too much already and the cruise isn't worth the considerable outlay...