China

China, by Daniele Somenzi The Korean Air flight is punctual as usual; this time it's a Boeing 777 taking us to Beijing, the on-board service as usual is impeccable, the stewardesses efficient and always, I say always, smiling, and they serve you with humility and not with arrogance. We land in Beijing and see that the airport, as one could imagine, is very large, with airlines arriving from everywhere. I even saw the North Korean airline with an old Ilyushin from the Mongolian Miat. At customs no problem; Giuseppe and I had got our visas in Italy. By now I felt at home, having been to China only three months earlier for the first time. I'd got there by motorbike from Italy in 46 days. We take a taxi that takes us along the motorway to the same hotel I'd used last time, just one km from Tiananmen Square.

The driver demonstrates what I'd predicted to Giuseppe, namely that there are no road rules in China, everyone does as they please, generating chaos. On the motorway he overtakes everyone from the emergency lane. Giuseppe, astonished, looks at me and says nothing. But I see he's a bit pale in the face; on top of that, the driver now and then spits phlegm out of the window and burps. Poor thing, I think, he can't be feeling well. It's freezing cold in November, but we set off anyway towards the great square. Giuseppe says that once he gets going he runs like a train, meaning that when he's stiff he struggles to walk but once he's warmed up nobody can stop him. The square is full of tourists; we snap photos in bursts and go into the Forbidden City. Giuseppe is very happy; he dreamed of coming here, and I made him happy, yes indeed.

I must say that I came back to Beijing only to please him, who before going to meet his maker wanted to see the Great Wall. A stroll among the crumbling little markets where they sell everything brings back to Giuseppe's mind the post-war years. Here in Beijing they sell everything, even dog skins and the gearbox cogs of some car, as well as live fish and even watermelons at zero degrees. In a shop I buy a small plastic bag with a compound sealed inside that, if you rub it together, warms up thanks to the chemical mixture inside, so you warm your hands. I buy a couple of one-euro watches and red gloves for the cold, also three euros. Really low prices. The next day we take a tour that takes us near Badaling to walk a kilometre on the Great Wall. Giuseppe is over the moon, and on top of that it's a sunny day.

A woman with a camel and Mongolian clothes lets you, for a couple of euros, have your photo taken on the humpy quadruped. Here there are plenty of tourists; and who comes to China without going to the Great Wall and to Xi'an to see the terracotta army? On the streets the traffic of every kind of vehicle is very heavy; in our imagination we expected bicycles and nothing more, but that's no longer the case. Anyway there are many cycle lanes, also full of extremely quiet electric scooters with a range of about sixty km per charge. After visiting the Great Wall by coach we go to a large monastery where we see the Buddhas and the ceremonies they perform. Honestly, these things don't interest me; I'd rather do a safari in the nature of Kruger Park in South Africa.

On the last day we negotiate the price with the taxi driver to take us to the airport, but on the motorway he asks us for more yuan for the toll. What a rip-off; otherwise he'd leave us at the toll booth. At the airport we see some North Korean athletes at the check-in of their airline, watching us enviously, probably because we're Westerners and they are prisoners. They let them leave the country for competitions while holding their families hostage and threatening reprisals if they defect. The wind is very strong that day at the airport but flights aren't cancelled, just a bit of buffeting as our big Korean Air beast departs for Seoul. Bye bye