We had been looking forward to the Chinese part of our trip for quite a long while. This would be the first part of the world trip where we were “going off the beaten path” so to speak. The adventure was not too outrageous, because I had an old college roommate, Ed Williams, who was picking us up at the airport. He had been waiting for nearly two hours when we finally walked through customs – owing to the late arrival of our plane out of Singapore AND the mistaken arrival time noted on my itinerary plans.

Nevertheless, Ed was good spirited and we drove to his house in a rented van with a Chinese driver, who regretfully couldn’t use the highway, because they were doing road work at night. This meant that our 30 minute trip became over an hour!

Ed has lived on and off in Beijing for a little more than 8 years and his intimate knowledge of the people, places of interest and above all, possible “trouble spots” with our children was all very well accepted. All the more so, because after his great initiation, he left us to fend for ourselves because he was flying back to LA for a knee operation two day after we arrived.

On the first day of our visit we walked Tiananmen Square with the Memorial Hall to Chairman Mao as well as Legislature building and monuments of the People’s heroes. To paraphrase a guide book that I had been reading, when you get to China, the sheer force (and numbers) of humanity overwhelms you! Our children were quite the objects of attention and picture taking! After a while we just had to start saying NO and work our way through the crowds.

We were on our way to visit the Forbidden City and although Ed’s knee was visibly aching, he accompanied us on our way through the temple. Some of the buildings were being renovated for the upcoming summer Olympics of 2008, a slight determent that we would witness at almost all of the temples and parks that we would visit in Beijing. About half way through, the sky opened up and it rained heavily. Now all of the thousands of roaming people were contained under the roofs and temple overheads that would offer some protection from the elements. We simply stepped out and decided to get wet! We really had no other choice.

After trying to stick it out for nearly two hours and failing to find any available taxis, we headed to a restaurant for a very well deserved late afternoon bite to eat and drink. Our first day in Beijing was an absolute success and every day there after as well.

Another of our highlights was our visit to the Great Wall of China. In an attempt to avoid the masses of people we drove to the Simatai part of the wall and had planned a four hour trek to the next village of Jinshanling. The taxi ride out took nearly 4 hours (instead of the planned 2 hours) and when we arrived, my children could not be too enthusiastic about the start of a 4 hour hike with the at least the first hour ALL UPHILL! So we opted for a partial ride up with a cable car and then only having to finish the last 300 hundred meters on foot. We then carried on to the highest point, which took another 40 minutes, before picnicking at the top of the last tower. Simply amazing!

We walked down to the bottom before returning to our taxi and the long ride back to Beijing. But we had missed the crowds which was our goal for the day. One of the highlights of the trip was the ride down a 500 meter steel cable attached only by a mountain climbing belt and karabiner. Oh the thrill of sliding down that cable over a man-made lake was a fitting way to end our trip to the Great Wall of China.

In the land of copies, I was always very busy trying to find any imitations of our Carl F. Bucherer watches. Whenever looking at all of the copies, my TravelTec got its well deserved attention. Not too many of my Chinese vendors had seen the likes of this watch, nor could they fathom the three time zone and chronograph functions that I would try to show them.

Beijing is a well deserved visit on anyone’s travel agenda and this is a city that we will certainly return to again on another visit to Asia.