15. THE BEIJING WALTZ

Transport for locals

Beijing is the last stop on the Trans-Mongolian Railway, completing a journey of almost 7,000km for the creaking, tired trains that shimmered youthfully out of Moscow a week before. For us, with diversions, expeditions and stops, it's taken more like three months. Although our wandering will continue from here, it still feels like the completion of an adventure to arrive in this thriving city of 16 million people, all of whom seem to have gathered outside the station to greet us. Most of them are in the taxi queue.

The place contrasts with everything we've seen so far. It's both more modern and more historic than any city we've visited; verdant with trees, bushes and parks where Ulaan-Baatar was desolate with dust and rubble; and unlike anywhere in Russia, it offers all sorts of eating, drinking and sleeping possibilities that don't come at a cost equivalent to losing your eyeballs. We attacked the city's street food like hungry dogs, which is probably what most of it was made from. Finally, unlike Russia or Mongolia, most of the people in Beijing are sober, and some of them even appear untouched by heriditary madness.

All this pleasantness, and the fact that I've visited before while Mari hasn't, gave me a relaxed and proprietorial air, as if I were something of an expert. This confidence took a bit of a knock when I agreed to a rickshaw ride that turned into a half-hearted attempted mugging, but even that didn't really come off. The driver took us down a back street and demanded 100 times the agreed price; once he realised the intimidation wasn't getting him anywhere he stomped off feeling, I hope, thoroughly humiliated by a good telling-off from Mari. What a little shit (the rickshaw driver, not Mari).

Everything was going so well, in fact, that I even felt secure enough to visit a local barbers. You'd have to be demented to submit yourself to any Russian or Mongolian man armed with scissors, razor blades and alcohol-based products, and over time my hair had grown so luxuriant and bushy that it was causing delays at passport control. Hutongs - teeming alleyways and courtyards where generations of Beijing families have lived out their lives in cramped community - are lined with local barbers. Unfortunately I picked a place that featured barber's chairs, mirrors, sinks, scissors, razors and gels, but didn't seem to be in the business of cutting hair. After I'd convinced the man to do it he went about the task so hesitantly, and had to be so coaxed into continuing after every few snips, that I'm convinced it wasn't a barbers at all and all that equipment was used for some other sort of business. God knows what. Maybe it was a high-end Halal butchers.

Eventually he gave up altogether and wouldn't continue for anything, clearly not buying the idea that I might like all the parts of my hair cutting to the same length. I had to finish it myself back at the hostel. Mari would have helped if I could've waited until she stopped laughing, but by then the hair would've grown back even more joyfully abundant than it had been in the first place.

Equipped with my experimental new haircut, we visited the tourist sites - the Lama Temple, with its 18-metre high statue of a giggling golden Buddha carved from a single trunk of sandalwood, and the Forbidden City. The huge palace complex was built in the 15th Century by the first Ming emperor at Hollywood expense, and five centuries later finished up being the setting for an expensive Hollywood film, so maybe he knew what he was doing all along. In between it housed the simmering court of concubines, eunuchs and mandarins and each successive Son of Heaven, until the last boy-Emperor was dethroned in 1911 and exiled within it to his own lonely opulence while the Empire dissolved into ashes outside the walls. Today you can buy an audio guide when you go there and have the whole thing mellifluously explained to you by Roger Moore.

Mari also went for a trek along the Great Wall with our friend Christoph, but the last time I was there I became paralysed with fear I would fall off. Recalling my Altai humiliation I decided to give it a miss.

Instead I stayed in town rambled through the hutongs. These are really the place to be. You can get lost for hours, watching the old women gossip, the children play, and the old men taking an afternoon stroll in their pyjamas or playing endless games of chess. When you're thirsty, you stop at a small shop for a 40p bottle of beer and drink it outside on a tiny stool in the sunshine. Every street is a market; people lay out cloths of exotic fruit and the air crackles and sizzles with the cooking of all kinds of meat, vegetable and insect. (The scorpions are crunchy but sadly lacking flavour.) This is how we spent our days.

Evenings were even better. At first we had passed them drinking with Aaron and Lambert, who we'd met in Mongolia and bumped into again trying to make a living selling pizza on Beijing's main tourist bar street. They were living in a tent on the roof. Unfortunately the whole thing turned sour when their local sponsor/business partner - a temperamental American called Justin - hurled the portable oven across the street, cast over their trestle table like Jesus in the Temple, and screamed "IT'S ALL FUCKING OVER, YOU HEAR ME?" while trying to persuade them they were drawing too much attention to themselves and might fall foul of the police. With such insightful management, the enterprise was doomed.

Instead, Mari and I took to sitting in the little neighbourhood between the Drum Tower and the Bell Tower, watching the local life. At night a man would bring a speaker out into the square and all the street's old people would gather to waltz in their pyjamas to Strauss under the stars. Eventually, we even got the courage to join in. Well - Mari waltzed, I stumbled and tried to avoid her toes. Nobody seemed to mind us being there. You couldn't do that in Ulaan-Baatar, and in Moscow you'd get shot.