Home / Blog / Day 8 – Temple of Heaven

Day 8 – Temple of Heaven

Conveniently located down the road from our hotel, this UNESCO world heritage site (https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/881/) should have been easy to organise a visit to. However, the complexities of arranging anything independently made obtaining tickets a BIG deal…..how hard can it be I hear you ask… well I’ll tell you…

Normally a visit to the internet would point you in the right direction and could well lead to a link to allow you to book tickets. Not so here…good luck with the dodgy wifi and site blocking in the first place. If you manage to find an official site and get an English translation it’ll result in advice something like this – “book tickets through WeChat”.

Great! I have WeChat so should be simple….think again…you get all the way through the steps seeing the finish line in sight when….”contact number error”….arghhhhhhhh. No I do not have a Chinese mobile number!

Luckily for a visit to the Temple of Heaven, Nick saved the day (and my sanity) by managing to book through http://trip.com

So off we went having picked up snacks from the 7-Eleven nearby to keep us warm for the next few hours wandering around the various points of interest that form the complex of imperial religious Confucian buildings in temps around 10c with a biting wind🥶

All-in-all well worth the hassle to get there, very happy to have got there.

What a welcome to Beijing!!! NOT!!! The announcement on the aircraft, to my ears, was along the lines of if you don’t record fingerprints when you arrive at Daxing International Airport (Beijing) you are likely to be deported; that didn’t feel like the welcome I was expecting!! Anyway, we are pretty much compliant with authorities...

Today we headed north of Beijing to the Olympic Park, and to see the bird’s nest for real. Before we got that far though we spotted the Olympic Tower, it’s hugely tall. This is another attraction in Beijing/China where you need tickets to get in, and a passport. Passport not a problem, we carry them...

A fairly quiet day today, we had a flight at 19:00 to Shanghai so we took it fairly easy. We decided to go to the Muslim Quarter, somewhere we had heard about, but didn’t really know much about. This was a great area, a labyrinth of streets filled with small food stalls, souvenir places and...

This is a super hotel, and we’ve stayed in here twice between 2022 and 2024. Its location is about 90 minutes north of Phuket Airport, and getting here is really easy with an airport taxi which you can book in advance. The pick up at all Thai airports has always been without any problems, although...

Siem Reap is a great place, and we really enjoyed it! To be honest we weren’t really sure what we were going to find in Siem Reap, other than the Angkor Wat temple park. However, this place is bustling and there was plenty of night life for us to walk around. Like most other places...

Maybe this is the reason we came to China in he first place, I think it was actually … Not only are we big kids at heart, but we first visited Disney in Orlando back in 1997 not that long after we were married. Since then alone, and with the kids, we had been lucky...