I’m survived from the hot summer holidays from Tianjin/Beijing/Chengde. This trip was plan a bit out of my earlier plan and it’s fall on summer in China. Me & Adeline touch down at Tianjin Haibin Airport around 7.30am but we are not allow to go down until the health officers have finished checking all our health info form. This is also additional procedure in view the increment of AH1N1 cases happened around the world recently.
The weather there is like hot oven and to escape from the heat, I slightly change the plan to spend more days in Chengde (Mountain Resort of Qing Emperors) and Bashang (boarder between Hebei and Inner Mongolia). Anyway, we still manage to visit Olympic bird nest and watch ballet show in water cube stadium in Beijing with our colleague from Beijing. The show was performed by famous ballet group from Russia, with combination of ballet on stage and synchronise swimming in the pool.
Next day we took bus to Chengde from Shanliqiao bus station and the journey suppose only took about 4 hours but we ended up reach Chengde in 6 hours. Chengde, lying in the northeast of Hebei Province, is close to Beijing, about 230 kilometers away. The bus left the station around 7.30am but along the way, the bus conductor keep stopping to get more passengers. The bus journey passed the Gubeikou where the famous Shimatai great wall was nearby. We only able to cover mountain resort in the afternoon and spend about 3 hours listen to the stories related to each of the special buildings in the summer resort.
On the subsequent day, we have joined 1 package tour to Bashang which commonly joined by the locals. This is the most popular trip for the local to spend their summer holiday. But this type of tour are very commercialise, the tour guide will spend more time at those places that can bring them more commission like horse riding and tube rafting. The horse man will hold the rope and pulling you around with you riding on the horse back. It’s charged RMB50 per hour and the tour guide will convince you to take longer ride so that they can earned more commission. Compared to 18 years ago when I first traveled in China, we don’t see any locals traveled around China and most of the time just foreign tourists or oversea Chinese. But now China improved so much with economic getting better and better and now you can see 90% of the tourists are from China itself. They seem more afford to spent compare foreigners, every where are crowded with the locals especially during this long summer holiday.
Compared to Chengde and Bashang, Beijing & Tianjin really too hot for us to enjoy. Anyway we still covered all the places that we have planned in this trip. Beer becomes our best drinks daily to cold down our body after travel under hot weather. It’s a total different experience compare my past trip that we used to cover spring, autumn and winter. I will explore more to inner Mongolia if we have chance to do so next time.
