Dueling Backpacks

Day 334 (May 28, 2019) – Gubeikou, Beijing, China We took a bus from downtown Beijing to the northeast corner of Beijing Municipality on the boarder with Hebei Province and arrived at Gubeikou in the pouring rain. It was raining buckets, which wasn’t a good sign. We were in Gubeikou to spend some time outdoors hiking along the Great Wall. It was starting to remind us of our drenched hike in New Zealand before we even started. After taking shelter at the bus stop during the worst of it, a brief pause in the rain gave us enough time to run out and meet the host from our guesthouse, who had arrived in his car to take us the rest of the way.

Day 331 (May 25, 2019) – Beijing, China Beijing is enormous. I feel like we only ever saw a tiny section of the city during our time there. It was also noticeably more expensive than other places we had been in China and, to our surprise, much hotter. We were staying in a hotel near the drum and bell towers, which are just north of the Forbidden City. Around the neighborhood were many small residential areas with narrow, interconnecting alleys called hutongs. Most of the neighborhoods were quite historical, with some houses and courtyards being hundreds of years old.