The sky was beautifully bright this morning and a lovely wintery blue. We took a taxi out to the Fragrant Hills Park, also known as Xiangshan Gongyuan, cos we'd seen on the news the other night that the leaves should be turning red about now, and we found it on our map. The taxi driver dropped us at the bottom of the road to the park because the road itself was impassable with pedestrians and a street market.

We walked up a steep hill to the entrance of the park through hundreds of thousands of people. There were stalls along the road side selling an enormous selection of nuts and fruit and sugary things on sticks and cards and wooden boxes and things I didn't recognise but might have been paste. And there were rows and rows of little glasses, like tealight holders, containing a teaspoon of water and two tiny turtles trying to escape. Next door were miniature bottles the size of a single large grasshopper and containing said creature. One stall had tiny cubic cages, about three inches across, holding pairs of tiny guinea pigs or baby rabbits. Mikey pulled me past them all.

The most astonishing thing about this little walk was the noise. Not only were thousands of people conversing, but all the stalls had loudhalers declaring the wares available, and some of them, the stalls selling musical instruments, were demonstrating the kind of sound possible too. It was like listening to cricket on longwave radio in France, but at a hundred times the volume and without the occasional comprehensible word.

We entered the park and headed through lovely bright flower displays and past fountains to the cable car station. Our plan was simple: get to the top and amble down through the leaves and then see the Summer Palace in the afternoon. We didn't manage it though. The cable car was actually a chair-lift and took about fifteen minutes to get to the top. The way down took over three hours!

On the chairlift we were met with stares and giggles and calls of hello and the occasional camera flash when some surprised Chinese tourist came face to face with a Westerner! At the top of the hill was a lovely view over the whole of Beijing and the huge, unexpectedly massive park. There were stalls at the top selling the usual array of soft drinks and laminated butterflies and crowds of people. We started our descent, really just plodding along in a long line behind everyone else. After a while the path split and we managed to escape a bit. The path here was much more woodlandy, and the leaves were indeed beautiful, although there were no maples, which I was hoping for. We stopped a lot to take photos of the leaves and the views, and walked and walked some more. It was even slightly warm in the sunshine, which was nice. After about an hour and a half, we found that we were barely a quarter of the way down the hill, and we decided to take a more direct route. We still stopped at all the tiny pagodas and lookout points along the way, though! The crowds had thinned a bit, although we managed to draw one of our own when we stopped to eat an ice-cream. Crazy foreigners!

We were quite impressed that we didn't see a single westerner in the entire place until an English family called out 'Finally! Our first foreigners!' as they passed. I don't really like the familarity that other travellers, especially Americans, greet other white people with in Asia. It implies a solidarity that I don't feel and don't really want to be part of, but we normally manage to avoid it.

When we finally reached the bottom of the hill and the park exit, it was mid-afternoon and far too late to see the Summer Palace today, so instead we took a taxi into one of the older parts of Beijing and had a look at the Drum Tower. This is a large stone tower housing 24 drums at the top and gives excellent views of the ancient alleyways and houses of hutong, the traditional accommodation dwindling rapidly in the city. The nice man who sold us the tickets to the entrace of the tower mimed that there would be drums when the big hand reached six, so we climbed the absurdly steep stone steps to the top, took some photos of the views (OK, a lot of photos, but I love rooftops!), read about the Chinese calendar and the lunar cycle and managed to be inside for the half-hourly beating of the drums which was rather nice. Then we clambered down and spent the last of the daylight investigating the hutong surrounding the tower.

This was something that I'd wanted to see since we arrived, and I wasn't disappointed. There were tiny alleys and lanes that led to brick and stone houses, and plenty of old people sitting around and looking scenic. There was a large crowd round four people playing Mah Jong, which I'd love to learn one day, and they even made room for us to have a look after they'd stared at us. One of the men even started spitting in the opposite direction to where I was standing, which I took as a great compliment! Down one lane, where all the houses were jumbled together in a mass of brick and corrugated iron, two old men sat on disembodied coach seats and watched the world go by. People just went about their lives while we wandered past, and it was really, really nice. Ancient bicycles laden with all sorts of bundles trundled past us.

In the big local square, there was series of metal bars and wheels and things that looked like playground toys. They were in fact the hutontg's equivalent of a gym for all the residents - a pair of old people were walking on dangling metal bars, striding along and chatting. It was definitely a version of a cross-trainer!

We had a good meal at a restaurant just down the road from our hotel, and then we tried to ask our reception if we could stay another night here. It didn't go that well, and the lady they phoned to talk to me kept giving me directions to the nearest bank. In the end, the receptionist took out a well-used phrasebook that had such useful lines as "Please endorse it for me." and "Beijing is the cultural and political capital of our country." We've decided to employ another tactic in the morning!