11 days of mayhem - day 9

Monday the 13th of April we got up at around 10 (slightly hungover from the surprising amount of beer we drank the night before) to find the best day of the trip (weather-wise) had arrived. It was around 27 degrees and not a cloud in the sky.

We checked out of the hotel (which I'll definitely be going back to since it was in such a convenient location) and left our bags there to pick up later. Our flight was at 7, so we figured we had most of the day to wander around the two remaining places we wanted to visit - the Temple Of Heaven and the Forbidden City. We started off at the Temple Of Heaven - a short taxi ride away and no problem at all to get to thanks to the handy cards that the hotel gave us which had the names of places in English and Chinese next to each other. After grabbing a quick pastry from a nearby bakery, we made our way into the temple area.

We ummed and aaahed about getting mp3 players to give us an audio tour, but ended up deciding to to walk and see what we could see. I was given a map and delegated as the guide to the area by the other two lads who really weren't up to the task. The first thing that we noticed is that the ToH area is very big - 2.73 sq km to be precise. The guide started out by telling us that the main temple, the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvest is the most famous temple in the world. Well, none of us had ever heard of it, but there's no surprise there. The complex was built between 1406 and 1420, but was extensively restored in 2006 in preparation for the Olympics, so the facilities were pretty good and the garden areas looked immaculate.

e made our way past some of the smaller areas first. The Imperial Vault of Heaven is a series of three buildings containing the tablets of the God of Heaven, which were used in worship ceremonies. It was surrounded by Echo Wall, a big circular wall where you can supposedly speak in a normal voice at one point and have someone hear you on the other side. There were far too many people yelling at the wall for us to try, so I'll just have to assume that it's a bit of a crock. We finally made it to the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvest, which is admittedly quite impressive (link), and spent a bit of time wandering around taking photos and being, well, tourists. After a couple of hours in the temple grounds, we decided to leave and make our way to the Forbidden City.

The Forbidden City was back over near Tiananmen Square, so we hopped into a taxi and were there in no time at all. Once again we decided to forego the audio guide and simply wandered around ourselves. This time we couldn't find anywhere to get a good map like at the ToH, so we just had to make do with reading the signs on each of the buildings that we went past. It was built around the same time as the ToH (1406), and had some extremely impressive buildings. I noticed quite a few large copper pots around the place, and towards the end of the visit found the reason for them - they used to be filled with water and used to fight any fires that broke out inside the complex. There were more than 300 of these pots, and although they are pretty big and could hold quite a bit of water, I wonder how effective they would have been if a really big fire had broken out.

We wandered along taking pictures of the different buildings (names like 'Hall of Supreme Harmony', 'Hall of Preserving Harmony', 'Hall of Central Harmony' - I'm sensing a theme), statues and stones. There is one stone inventively named 'The Large Stone', which is a huge stone ramp with a number of dragons carved on the front. It weighs around 200 tonnes and is the largest such carving in all of China. All in all, we were suitably impressed by everything the Forbidden City had to offer, and ended up finishing our visit in a couple of hours.

At this point we stopped to get some lunch, and then went back to the hotel to get our bags and made our way to the airport. We had figured that traffic would be a lot worse (being a weekday), but we still got out there in less than an hour, and in fact had arrived too early to check in. So we sat down in KFC and utilised the free wifi for a while before getting on our plane and getting back to Shanghai. We were fairly buggered when we got home (at 10:30pm or so) so we had only the second night on the entire trip where we didn't have a single beer. My liver was very happy.