Sightseeing in Beijing

The apparent tardiness of these posts relates in part to the difficulties in accessing the Internet on our hotel’s WiFi system. It won’t work with our VPN and without the VPN there are a number of sites that are unavailable due to government regulation. Among them: Google, Gmail, YouTube, New York Times, Denver Post, Instagram, Facebook, X, Netflix. This page took ~15 minutes to load before content could be added.

We spent yesterday being Beijing tourists. Keith located a guide through our concierge and we were off to the Forbidden City and Tianamen Square. Security was high. Many, many video cameras, 4 different checkpoints that involved showing our passports and standing in front of facial recognition screens and a couple of pat downs/ metal detector sweeps. The square is huge and bounded by the Great Hall to the west, Mao’s mausoleum to the south, and the Forbidden City to the north. The square itself is surrounded by sentries standing at strict attention for two hour shifts. It It has an area of 44 hectares (127 acres). The Forbidden City, which required additional security to enter, is similarly huge with a whole series of buildings with various functions. They limit the visitors to 30,000 per day.

One striking feature of our excursion was that 98% of the tourists at these famous spots were Chinese. We didn’t see any other Americans. We were such a novelty that a middle-aged Chinese woman photo bombed one of our group pictures to have a souvenir on her phone, 3 women in traditional royal costumes had pictures taken with us and a group of Chinese school children on a tour offered us snacks and requested group pictures. People were very friendly and pleasant. After a traditional Chinese lunch, it was off to a tea tasting/lecture and then back to the hotel. As we sat in traffic, our guide Jenny informed us that we were very lucky that the traffic was so light. Beijing has a strict congestion policy that is monitored by an extensive array of cameras. People without the appropriate license plate are not allowed to drive inside the 4th Ring Road. This explains why we had to once again supply documentation to the rally organizers so that they could obtain permits allowing us to drive in central Beijing. We finished the day getting a tutorial on our Garmin navigation system from John Spiller, an old hand in the rally business. On the 15th, we finally get to pick up our cars.