Beijing: Thursday, September 8, 2011:

After breakfast I spotted people taking empty water bottles to refill with unsafe tap water.

It is panda-monium. Beijing Zoo is to the west of the city and is the largest in all of China.

There are 10 giant pandas there and there are a total of 1700 in China.

Two years ago there were 20 but they starved to death – they rely on a particular type of bamboo and it had withered away so they died.

Panda DNA is similar to that of rabbits and their life expectancy is around 30 years.

At the zoo there were giant pandas, red pandas and snub-nosed monkeys but the giant pandas attract the biggest crowds.

We later visited the Summer Palace which was built 600 years ago.

There is a manmade lake and mountain and it was burned down twice – in 1860 during the Opium war and in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion.

We take a boat known as Empress or the Dragon Lady – “Even the tide wouldn’t take her out. She looked like the back of a bus.”

There was a Marble Boat and the Long Corridor. There was a vase outside the Empress Dowager’s bedroom and the Hall of Happiness and Longevity. There were lots of visitors at the Summer Palace.

We enjoyed lunch at a hotel restaurant and I managed to catch a couple of films. We left the hotel at 5pm for a local restaurant and enjoyed one of the best meals of the trip so far.

There was the first rain of the holiday but it was not too heavy and was steady and warm.

We enjoyed The Kung Fu show (Chunyi: The Legend of Kung Fu) which was spectacular. They were tumbling on their heads and performing feats of martial arts.

On the way back to the hotel I took a few shots from the bus of Beijing at night.