We spent four nights in St Petersburg, three in Moscow, three in Ulaanbaatar, and now six in Beijing, and this is the first time we leave regretting that we didn't have more time. Our only real complaint about Beijing is that it is hard to decide whether it is less attractive not to see the sky at all and suffer from the humidity, or to see the sun as we have done the last two days and be HOT HOT HOT.

Traffic here is crazy, but the ubiquity of taxis has saved us from the worst annoyance. It is perhaps not so strange that traffic is an issue when you realize that in 1998, there were only 300,000 cars on the streets of Beijing. A few years later, that number had doubled. Now there are three million, and another half million are expected to hit the roads by next year. In other words, there are a LOT of inexperienced drivers out there! Might makes right, so bicyclists threaten pedestrians but are themselves threatened by taxis, who have (sometimes) to yield to buses. Honking is constant, both in order to tell people where you are and simply as an expression of annoyance whenever there is traffic. It is totally frustrating to someone who isn't used to it, but perhaps also sometimes to Beijingers. When we were returning from the wall, our driver honked repeatedly at a bicyclist, who clearly had had enough: he flipped our driver off twice, to cheers from all of us in the bus who well understood his frustration.

We're off to Guangzhou (Canton) tonight, then to Hong Kong in the morning. Then we fly to Bangkok and then Hanoi on Saturday. Hopefully we'll find time to do some proper posts soon!