Whole Travel Blog

When thinking about Beijing, images of the recent Olympics, the Forbidden City, and the Great Wall come to mind. However, there’s a completely different kind of China to discover on the outskirts of Beijing.

This week’s New York Times Travel section explores the hiking opportunities that abound in the lush, mountainous regions surrounding Beijing and declares fall the perfect time to visit. Read more about it here.

While many travelers choose to visit the popular and often over visited landmarks of China, among them the Great Wall, the Yin Ruins, and the Forbidden City, more and more travelers are beginning to choose to travel off the beaten path to a more authentic and oftentimes more remote China. Fortunately, more eco-lodges are popping up to assist this new trend where supporting the local community is an inherent feature of a traveler’s stay. A good example is the Yangshuo Mountain Retreat which has committed to being sustainable through the creation of its own well which lessens its dependence on water resources, by hiring staff from nearby villages, and also by committing to replacing coal with alternative energy by 2009.

Two other ecolodges in China are Wenhai Ecolodge and Alou’s Tibetan Lodge.

From American cyclists arriving in Beijing wearing surgical masks to front-page photos of gray, haze-obscured Olympic venues, the lead-up to the 2008 Olympic Games was congested with complaints and controversy surrounding Beijing’s poor air quality. Focusing a significant amount of energy on the faults of the Chinese government, major American media outlets featured Chief Medical Editors and Air Quality Correspondents in order to highlight Beijing’s “poor preparation” and “failed attempts” to purge smog from the city’s skyline. Throughout this process, there was little mention of the drastic and progressive measures that the city of Beijing undertook in an effort to successfully reduce pollution for the duration of the Games. Where was the praise for the 1.1 million cars removed from Beijing streets from Aug. 8 – Aug. 24? Where was the recognition for shutting down polluting factories & harmful construction? Where was the applause for lowering city-wide pollution by over 50% in a period of only one month?

Beijing's Bird's Nest Olympic Venue surrounded by blue skies!

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Urban communities around the globe, particularly in North America and Northern Europe, are increasingly taking steps to become more environmentally sustainable by doing things like improving public transportation systems and promoting renewable forms of energy.

Yet some of the biggest buzz these days surrounds cities that are being designed and created explicitly for the purpose of being ecocities. The most well-known example of these efforts is Dongtan, a city that was designed by the British engineering firm Arup, and that is being developed on the island of Chongming, next to Shangahi. Read the rest of this entry »

The way it was

I just finished reading the most recent issue of The Economist, and found an interesting article on the disappearance of cultural sites in Beijing. Check it out here. With all the focus on China and specifically Beijing this month because of the Olympics, it’s great to see this issue raised right now.

China has been preparing for August 8 since the turn of the century. While the world has watched, a labor force of 1.3m has worked on about 7000 giant sites to prepare Beijing for its self-dubbed “People’s Olympics.” With the promise of a “clean, green” theme, everyone lost sight of the cultural impact of all these projects. A few thousand religious sites have been reduced to a few dozen, mainly preserved as tourist destinations. It’s a sad reality, but in modernizing the capital city we’ve done something incredibly un-sustainable - removed the vast majority of culturally significant sites in lieu of new buildings and amenities.

It’s a great case study for sustainable tourism. If we could go back a decade and start again, maybe we could design a plan that would preserve more of China’s cultural heritage, while at the same time improving the necessary infrastructure and preparing for the Olympics.

I’m flying to Shanghai this evening, so in honor of that I wanted to post something on China.

As August 8th approaches, more and more scrutiny has been leveled at the world power that in previous months has come under the spotlight for air pollution in Beijing.  While news outlets anxiously await word of blue skies, relatively little coverage has been devoted to the positive steps China has taken to try to make the Olympics greener.

The video below features the Beijing Olympic Green Convention Center, which has incorporated features to reduce waste and energy consumption.  Rain water is collected on the roof for flushing systems and the irrigation of the convention’s gardens, and an ice storage cooling system and a “free air cooling” ventilation system are used in the public foyers of the convention center.  While China clearly has a long way to go in promoting environmental responsibility and sustainability, I do think the inclusion of green features at the convention center says something as to how far mainstreamed the green movement truly is.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ji5Mu85y1k]

The 270,000 square meter convention center, located on Olympic Boulevard, was designed by British architectural firm RMJM.  It incorporates the largest ever Olympic media facility, retail, commercial, and hotel space, and sporting halls for the fencing and the pentathlon pistol shooting events.  The building will reopen as China’s National Convention Centre in 2009.