The trip to New Zealand

Finally on the road again. After a long wait to see whether we would get our truck back from Italy before the departure (we didn't), we are on the move to New Zealand.

The itinerary is pretty simple. We are flying with Air China from Paris to Beijing (9h) and later on from Beijing to Auckland (13h...). We decided to plan so that we would have a 14h layover in Beijing so we could exit the airport and sightsee a bit.

The plane part was pretty uneventful as it goes, we were pretty impressed by the service of Air China consider the relative low cost of the trip. We arrived in Beijing by noon on the 15th November, and proceeded to try to exit the airport. It's fairly unsettling when coming from regions where everybody at leaast understands English to be dropped in a city where some people in the airport just don't have any command of English (and why should they really). So we cued for a good half hour in the passport control thinking it was going to be a case of stamping a passport with a stamp saying "allowed for 72h" like in Malaysia but no. When they saw that we had a connecting flight they just assumed we were a bit thick and tried to corral us into the International transfer line.

Anyway, after much gesticulation, we figured out that there was a desk for people who want to get a free 72h visa to exit the airport. Stamp in hand we headed back to passport control. Everything went well and we went on our way to take the Airport Shuttle train back into town and then a couple of Metro rides to get to Tiananmen Square.

The first shock was the weather. Beijing is COLD. On that day the temperature couldn't have been more than 3°C. I was under the (false) impression that Beijing has a lot milder climate than that. The second shock was the fact that we were positively incapable of pronouncing the name of any place correctly. The metro system in beijing is super user friendly we made our way needing almost no help.

On the way and when we arrived, my "larger than average" height and "gingerer than average" beard seem to gather a lot of attention. Interesting feeling. We must have gone through a million metal detectors that way but finally made it to the Square. The Square is actually pretty large and has a great avenue going through it. It holds the MAOsoleum of the great chairman, a few monuments to the people of China and the Forbidden city.

While we were looking at a map, looking like the biggest tourists in the world some guy came to talk to us, because he wanted to show us some ink paintings (red flags & scam alarms going off at every level) took us inside this little shop and showed us some very average ink paintings and then offered to draw our names in calligraphy. So like the tourists we are we said yes and were offloaded of 30 Yuans. We couldn't actually go inside the forbidden as it was conviniently closed on that day. Oh well.

We were pretty tired from the flight and the walking so we decided to get something to eat and head back to the airport. Except for one minor issue.

See, China has an unpleasant relationship with google. Now if you want to find a place to eat, you want to google it, except you can't. And if you find a place to eat you're going to try to get the way to get there using google maps. Excetp you can't. It made me realise that I had no way to communicate that wasn't blocked in China: Google, Facebook, Whatsapp, ... all blocked. So we had to kind of guess it.

So we took the train, decided to get down in the place where most people seem to be going off and walk around to find a place that would serve "Asian Food". After looking for a good 45 min for something that didn't look like we were going to spend the next 13h flight in the toilets we had to admit defeat. And headed to Mc Donald's. A bitter defeat.

We then headed back to the airport bought a couple of souvenirs and waited patiently for our next flight trying not to doze off.

The next flight was again painfully unventful we arrived in Auckland on the 16th at 18h30 utterly exhausted and looking forward to a week of jetlag.

The next step in our trip is to plan our first 4 day trek. Super excited !!!