Beijing Diary: Ride to Summer Palace Area

Shopping Center and Old Houses
Today we road our tandem to the Summer Palace area. Our route was due west along Xueyuannan Road, which is the south border of the Beijing Normal University Campus, and further along turns into Weigongcun Road. Then we wiggled over to Kunminghu Road running up the Beijing Canal to the Summer Palace (Google Map). This turned out to be a quite a pleasant route, without too much traffic. There was alot of construction alongside the canal road, but again not too much traffic. We only had one near miss with a taxi the whole way! An old guide book to bike rides in Beijing says there was an interesting Uyghur community in the Weigongcun area, but more recent guides say this has all been knocked down, to be replaced by buildings like the shopping center in the photo above.

We decided not to go into the Summer Palace, since we have been there twice before, and it wasn't a clear day for good photos. Near the summer palace Beijing is beginning to thin out into farmland, and so we explored this a little. The people working in the fields were very friendly, and unlike the Beijing city-folk were quite curious about our "small handsome" tandem as one described it, and the idea of two people pedalling a single bike.

Orchard near the Summer Palace
One thing we found was a source of the white seed fluffs that fill the air on windy days in Beijing like gentle snow. It had always been curious that these fluffs were everywhere, but we could never see what tree they came from.

Willow Trees: "Spring Snow" Source

Spring Snow

Fishing Pond
You might be able to see some of the floating fluffs in the last picture above.

After riding some more (walking on the dirt roads) we came to an open air market. It was fun to wander around and have gestured (me) and spoken (Lynn) conversations with the stallholders, who were happy to talk with us at the primitive level we could manage, and to have their photos taken.