After a slightly chilly night, we woke to our first proper views of China. Much greener than what we'd seen before dark the previous day, with high mountains rising above terraced farmland and small, neat villages. Eventually, the landscape flattened and the train passed through miles of seemingly fertile farmland, each farm having several tiny areas packed full of cabbages, apples, cherries, grapes or sweetcorn. Around 100km from Beijing, though, the landscape became more mountainous again and we started the climb to Qonglingqiao, where we got our first decent view of one of the world's most famous constructions. For a good 30 minutes we had a series of fantastic views of the Great Wall, the train's gentle pace giving us the chance to see the shape of this part of the wall as it snakes over the hills. It might not (despite the legend) be visible from space, but it's unforgettable anyway. Hopefully we'll get to see more of it over the next few days.

Arriving at Beijing's main train station with no Chinese or US currency and finding only one defective ATM, we decided to walk the 1km to our hotel. Our first view of central Beijing was, we later realised, quite representative... spotlessly clean, wide boulevards lined with huge, stately hotel and business buildings, the hard urban edges softened by plenty of landscaped gardens and verges. As we neared our hotel, we found an example of how background reading can save you from gullible tourist episodes. A couple of girls came up to us (one after the other) welcoming us to China and asking how long we were staying. The second said she was a student and wanted to practise her English (which was already excellent). And then she came out with the crucial clue... "I'm studying Chinese Art History; there's an exhibition you can come to near here". It's not a scam as such, but it is a very common example of fairly aggressive selling to tourists. I knew about this, so we politely got rid of her. We were a lot more lenient with this girl than with the "art students" we subsequently came across, but it's impossible to be harsh with them... they're always polite and cheerful and don't really do any harm.

The next thing was to check into our hotel. We'd booked another budget one on the Web, and although this certainly wasn't a hostel as with our slight miscalculation in UB, it wasn't great. Overall, it was a perfectly useable budget hotel, but we'd been put in the basement, with no natural light whatsoever. We could have put up with that, especially at £18 per night including breakfast, but when I went to enquire about getting a slightly more expensive room on a higher floor and encountered a member of staff (seemingly more senior than the standard front desk staff) who did a good line in arrogant twattery, we started to regret our choice. Rather than beating about the bush, we nipped out for a quick reconaissance mission, ideas of finishing our trip in relative comfort already forming in our heads. First stop, the Crowne Plaza... no standard rooms available, but would we care to view one of the Executive Club rooms? Ten minutes later, my credit card did its usual trick of climbing out of my pocket and into the welcoming hand of someone with a tasty product to offer. Admittedly, £90 a night is way more than we'd normally pay, but the room was like heaven on earth and the unlimited free drinks and food in the Club Lounge Happy Hour (6-8pm every day) are already saving us money that we'd be spending elsewhere. Sometimes you just have to let go of the ingrained student pikey mentality and live a little.

Knackered after a long and varied day, we could only amble as far as the hotel's traditional Chinese restaurant. Huge portions of delicious (and cheap) food and impeccably polite service.

Another sunny day - getting back to a British style autumn is going to take some getting used to. Wandered over to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Tiananmen Square (see top pic) is huge and imposing, with Mao's mausoleum on one side, his portrait glaring from above the gate and two rather ugly square stone buildings (one being the government building) on the other two sides. I must say I found it quite charmless, although there were attempts to brighten it up with greenery and floral decoration. It's not helped by its recent history, either - it's not easy to think of it without recalling the tanks and demonstrations of 1990.

This part of town is also not helped by people trying to sell you something all the time... postcards, books, Mao watches, coins... you name it. They're cheerful and take the inevitable rebuffs with a smile, but it gets wearing after a while.

Then onto the Forbidden City(see bottom pic), which is also huge and imposing in a completely different way. There's temple after temple, courtyard after courtyard and many thrones, treasures and so on inside the buildings, most of which you can't go in. Each emperor seemed to feel the need to add another temple or house to leave his mark... here is the temple where he put his coat on or met his concubines before moving onto X building for another ceremony. It reminded me of Gormenghast... lots of pointless ceremonies taking place in different locations on different days and having to be done to precise formulae. I wonder if Mervyn Peake ever visited the Forbidden City. The other thought that comes to mind is that it's not all that different to the Tsars' palaces in St Petersburg for the sheer excess of wealth and pomp. A lot has been said by cleverer people than me about Chinese civilisation, but the thing that strikes me is that people are the same everywhere (not that profound, I know!) You might wear a red wedding dress instead of a white one and get a jade bracelet rather than a gold ring, but in the end it all comes to the same thing.

Knackered after the Forbidden City, we returned to our hotel for a well earned drink and free canapes. At in a really bizarre vegetarian restaurant; instead of serving fresh vegetables, it prided itself on imitating meat in all its forms... from roast duck to minced beef to lobster. I have to say I didn't find it hugely appetising apart from the one truly vegetable dish we had, but it was an experience. One dish was smoked ("smoking") duck, and we found out afterwards that we were meant to eat it with the (apparently polystyrene) dim sum wrappings it came with. A northern speciality. I can see why it didn't take off in western Chinese restaurants. Mind, I didn't find the actual "duck" much better, but Adrian enjoyed it.

Having only three or four days in Beijing is tricky. There's plenty to do in the centre and a lot of it is well suited to slow, leisurely ambling, but there are so many other important things within day-trip distance. We decided the most pragmatic thing was to grab a few highlights; having seen Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City yesterday, we booked a coach trip to the Great Wall for tomorrow and decided to spend today exploring the Fragrant Hill area, way out in the suburbs. To get there, we started with our first taste of the Beijing Metro system. It's only a small three-line system at the moment (promised to expand to eight lines in time for the 2008 Olympics) but it's spotlessly clean, efficient and cheap... only Y3 (20p) for a single-journey ticket. After taking the Metro to the last stop, we had to get a taxi to Fragrant Hill. Maybe we should have looked specifically for an official metered taxi, but the Y50 quoted by the (unofficial?) driver we found didn't seem much to our London-hardened money sense; it was probably a 7-10km journey before we arrived at a dusty, bustling shopping street leading to the park.

Running the gauntlet of souvenir sellers, we finally got to the park and set about heading to the top of Incense Burner Peak, the 500m hill at its centre. There was a chairlift, but we decided to walk. Expecting the forest-lined path described in our guidebook, we must have taken a wrong turning, because we ended up walking up 500m of steps, which was pretty exhausting in the mid-day heat. Never mind... the views from the top were great. On the way down, though, we managed to find the gently winding forest trail, which gave us plenty of time to amble through various pavilions, temples and ornamental gardens within the park. One thing I've noticed about Beijing in general is that the Chinese seem to have a knack for landscaping. We're familiar with the graceful layouts of traditional Japanese gardens, but the Chinese also seem to be able to fine-tune little details of landscaping to perfection. Remember, the concept of Feng Shui is Chinese... this theory of prioritising the proper flow of "Qi" energy doesn't just apply to the furniture in your house, but also to the layout of a garden or city street. Unfortunately, it seems, a lot of the glitzy new building developments in Beijing are angering the locals in the way they interfere with the ideal Feng Shui of the original city layout.

With our Qi energy properly aligned (wherever it's supposed to be aligned) after a mixture of hard climbing and gentle ambling, we left the park and decided to try getting a bus to the Pingguoyuan Metro station. Yeah, despite the guidebook saying that bus travel in Beijing is a chaotic, confusing waste of time. Okay, so the 30 minutes it took us to travel about 2 miles down the road in a rattling pile of scrap metal probably was technically a waste of time, but hey... when you're on holiday, it's fun to try all the mundane things the locals have to do every day. And it only cost us Y1 (about 7p) each. Whoo! When telling the conductor of our desired destination (through the usual method of pointing at the map and looking hopeful) we hadn't understood her reply. Was it "no, we don't go there"? Or "yes, but you must be crazy to go there by this bus... it'll take two hours"? All was revealed later; we arrived at a stop and she pointed to the door, handing us a piece of paper on which she'd written the numbers of buses we could change to. Awww... some people are so nice here. Figuring a taxi would be quicker, though, we did the rest of the journey that way, only paying another Y10.

After taking the Metro back to Dongcheng District and showering the dust off in our hotel, the hotel's Chinese buffet deal sounded interesting. Although the ambience was a little "hotel lobby", the food was good. It would have been easy to pick'n'mix at everything, ending up with a rather bland aftertaste of "generic oriental", but I deliberately went for the Beijing food... fried duck, tofu and dim sum. Beijing was the Ming dynasty's northern capital (the name "Beijing" means just that) and although summers are hot, this is northern China and the local cuisine is appropriately solid and hearty. It's been interesting to see (and taste) Chinese food in China... although there are superficial similarities, most of what we've tasted is not much like what you'd find in your local Chinese takeaway or in London's Chinatown. I'm guessing that these places mostly serve Hong Kong and Cantonese food. For a start, portions tend to be larger, so it's much more common to have one or two main dishes, rather than picking from a selection of small bowls. There's none of the spicy intrigue of Sichuan food, but the heavier Beijing cuisine is still quite satisfying and comforting.