Snapshot of Beijing

With a workout in every park, cheap bike hire and walks along the Great Wall, Beijing offers you every opportunity to work off that crispy duck

Beijing's Temple of Heaven

Tai Chi Chuan looks like a sport especially created for fat people. From one angle its measured moves smack of a martial art; from another, they smack of someone taking the piss. The better you are at it, the slower you go and in Beijing, people – especially elderly people – are very good indeed. Just watching them sends you into a trance.

I decided to join in the early morning class at Tiantan Park, the huge green space that surrounds the grand 500-year-old Temple of Heaven. The park’s only a few blocks south of the Forbidden City but is bird-tweetingly serene and, in winter, tourist-free. You are welcome to join in these public classes, but you can’t expect the master to come and tutor you for what may be months; he has to see you are committed. I doubt I even made his shortlist. For one thing, I lacked the poise of the Chinese practitioners around me. I couldn’t achieve total stillness, and when I stretched ever so slowly I found my muscles vibrated as if I was trying to lift a 100kg dumbbell.

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Healthwise, you could easily go under in Beijing. It’s huge, it’s polluted and you travel everywhere by cab. Evening means Peking ducks and Szechuan banquets. Yet, this is Olympic city. And China’s medal record is awesome, as is its history as the cradle of all kinds of meditative practices. Recent news suggests much is the product of secretive, military-style sports academies, but I saw few fat people in Beijing.

After my initiation into Tai Chi Chuan, I went for a bike ride. Thanks to the economic boom, a car is the first must-have for any member of the bourgeoisie, so cycling is a dying sport. But it is still the best way to see the Hutongs, the thirteenth-century alleys that criss-cross the downtown area – also dying as city planners go crane-crazy. I hired a guide for a day, Peter, who took me to a great little bike shop a couple of blocks west of the Temple of Heaven. For 60RMB (£4) – and a deposit of 600RMB (£40) – I was given a gear-less bike for the day.

Most people who want unmotorised wheels beneath them opt for a spin on the local rickshaws. But strolling through the Hutongs I’d seen quite a few foreigners on the back of these and they looked daft. They spent most of the time gawping listlessly and attempting to chat to their wholly monolingual drivers. By bike, you can take it slow. We toured markets, stopped to study the pigs’ cheeks, snouts, trotters and offal at an open-air butchers, checked out some Mao kitsch. I sampled tasty snacks, bought some gloves – my knuckles were raw with the cold – and, inspired by my morning, I picked up a t’ai chi DVD.

It was a bright, blue day and the four-hour ride was invigorating. I felt part of the proletarian stream of the city and the fact that no one seemed to be the least bit interested in me – so un-Chinese-looking and lanky on my little bike – made me happily anonymous. Afterwards, we rewarded ourselves with a big Szechuan banquet.

Beijing is dead flat – hence the bikes. But heading north, a three-hour taxi ride gets you to the low mountains along which lies the Great Wall.There is a choice of entry-points to the wall but a friend had told me that visiting the most popular, at Badaling – 70km north-west of the city – was like ‘being with the whole of China on a day out’. I opted for the more isolated and dramatic section at Simatai, 110km away. It cost 800RMB (£52) by taxi but, for that, the driver was happy to wait six hours and take me back to the city.