Delhi to Beijing – 20 March

Once at the Indira Gandhi International Airport passengers were advised that the flight had been postponed until 4:30am.  But on the bright side, this airport is open 24 hours, so we browsed around the stores a bit and settled into a sports restaurant/bar for a snack.  Although the restaurant wasn’t so busy, most of the passengers were eating, drinking, and nodding off and unlike the average Canadian establishment, one does not get kicked out for “nodding off”, which we both did periodically.  There is a hotel in this airport and it rents out rooms for 5 hours at a time and it is a useful thing given the 24hr nature of air travel here.

The 4½ hour Air China flight was very smooth and seemed to go by quickly.  Before you knew it we were at the Beijing Capital International Airport in Beijing and raring to get settled in this incredibly large city with 12 million citizens.

Shu from China CYTS Tours Holding Company was there to pick us up at the originally scheduled time, so she and the Driver had to wait around on this end.  Beijing has a really amazing set of 5 ring-roads surrounding the city.  It is a wonderfully clean and quiet city.  Our hotel, the Grand Mercure Xidan is centrally located.  We solidified our plans for the next morning and proceeded to enjoy our free-time afternoon.

We went for a short walk in the neighbourhood and discovered that the large modern buildings are located on the street front and there are many residential areas with small crowded streets located behind where homes and apartments are located (called Hutongs which means “side street”).  Some hutongs have thriving small home-front businesses, primarily food.  Although no one is sure how many hutongs there are, if one was to put all the homes in the Beijing hutongs together, it would be longer than the Great Wall.

We ate our dinner at the hotel and watched a bit of the True Grit remake before retiring early.  Somehow we need to make up for a lost night’s sleep.

elephant statue at Delhi airport



Beijing airport terminal 3, shaped like a turtle