Travelling through the old country!

Close your eyes, breathe deep and think about China. You'd probably be thinking about the Great Wall or the Forbidden City or for those in love with food (and there are many of my kind!) you'd probably have pictured the world famous Peking Duck or noodles. And you'd probably think of a hundred other things before images of a sunny beach with blue waves lapping at the coast crosses your mind. Come to think of it, they probably never would have! Yet I find myself irresistably drawn to China's eastern coast just 2 days after I touch down in Beijing!

My journey began at 6:30 a.m. on the 4th of June. A three hour train ride from Beijing took our group of nine to Beidaihe along China's east coast. Now I must explain some of the compulsions behing agreeing to go to a beach in China when there's always places like those i mentioned above to check out. Especially since I'm half-goan. (To the uninitiated - do an image search on google for "Goa"). The truth is, i've never really spent much time on any beach, anywhere...! And now would have been as good a time as any! So here I was, at the end of the world, well almost, staring out into the vast Pacific ocean, going into the water every now and then and coming back to the shore to dry off under the warm sun. This went on for about 4 hours... maybe it was more, but I wouldn't have known either way because when you're with a group of travellers who have covered virtually every corner of the globe, you don't stop sharing stories or asking questions about what it must've been like to climb pyramids or scuba dive around corals or make a spiritual pit stop at Varanasi!

But it ended and so us Lowai (foreigners in Mandarin) hired a taxi to take us to Shanghaiguan, about an hour away - and where the Great Wall meets the ocean! A great dinner of traditional Chinese fare was followed up by a visit to the shore at about midnight! (Duck is GREAT!)

It was all so surreal for me! At the end of my third day in China, which i'd spent sunbathing on a quiet beach, I was now standing at the edge of the Pacific Ocean listening to the waves come in while I looked up at hundreds of thousands of stars filling up the sky. It couldn't get any more peaceful, and it didnt! We decided to do some KTV (or Karaoke). A local nightclub called Nasa, filled with posters of who seemed like China's 2nd most famous citizen after Chairman Mao - Yao Ming would keep our spirits up (literally!) for a few more hours. Good drinks, great music, lousy voices!

Sleep came at about 3 in the morning. Tomorrow I would see the great wall!