… let the beach come to you!
This is two days old now, but early on in the week huge swarms of dust descended upon Beijing leaving everything coated in a layer of sand, reportedly from the North West of China. It was the worst sandstorms since 2001, and seemingly an indication that the government’s tree planting efforts have yet to bear fruit.
Pollution is a huge problem in China – particularly in the large cities, including Beijing. Despite local government efforts to promote more environmentally friendly fuels and to relocate factories out of the cities (though this only moves the pollution elsewhere ; sadly not enough effort is made to force factory owners to clean up their output), the air has cleaned up notably in the last year, but is still dirty enough to make most visitors choke on arrival.
