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July 22, 2008

Gavin’s Adventures In Beijing, Day 7

We woke up on Sunday to our second day of official non-work in Beijing, so Brooke and I decided to go for the the Big One of sightseeing - The Great Wall Of China.

• Hao and Fara claim that the best place to see the Wall is from Mutianyu, which is about an hour and a half outside of Beijing. They arranged a car and driver, and the four of us were off shortly after breakfast.
• The weather was not terribly cooperative - foggy, misty, and wet. Our visibility never really got beyond a few hundred feet. Each of us kept waiting for the sun to break through, or for us to leave the weather behind - never happened.
• We arrive at the base of the Great Wall, and find ourselves at tourist central. The path to the Wall is one gigantic tourist trap, with small shacks lining the walkway and selling every kind of Great Wall paraphernalia you can imagine - postcards, t-shirts, photos, knickknacks, ponchos, umbrellas, you name it. There's also fruit stands, snack stands, places selling water and beer. The sellers are aggressive, too, calling out in English phrases to get your attention, then trying to haggle with you on whatever item they saw you glancing at.
• Arriving at the base of the Wall is one thing; getting to the Wall is another. The government has installed a gondola to get people from the base to the Wall itself, but there's also a walking/hiking path made of stone. We opt for the hike. The climb is steep, and takes a good 20 minutes; I am reminded of the sand stairs at Baker Beach during Alcatraz. The moist weather isn't helping, either - it's like walking in a cloud. We pause as needed.
• The Wall astounds. The Great Wall is something I'd read about, of course, in my eight-grade history class (thanks again, Mr. DuBois, wherever you are), but, like the Pyramids or any of the other Seven Wonders, the Great Wall was something that was safely tucked in the pages of a book, and not an actual object that I'd be stomping around on one day.
• (And yet, here I am, and here it is, and here I find myself shaking my head with wonder about how small the world really is these days.)
• The overwhelming physicality of the Wall is incredible. It is made entirely of rough brick, made smooth and sloping in places from the contours of the land (which it hugs) or the erosion of millions of footsteps (which is has undoubtedly endured).
• At its heart, the Wall is a 20-foot-wide brick roadway, built to a height of about 30 feet. It follows the line of the mountain on which it's built, and has periodic guard buildings placed for lookouts and shelter for the soldiers that manned it.
• The thing is about as far from an antiseptic, safe-for-tourists attraction as you can imagine. The Wall slants and slopes, is slippery, has loose bricks, and offers many places to twist an ankle or fall on your ass. The hills are high and steep; going up is hard, coming down is harder. We feel like mountain goats.
• At no point does anybody complain about anything. The walk might be hard (and capable of taking the wind out of you), but, for all that, some poor bastards had to actually build it, which boggles the mind. (Your job, Oh 21st-Century Western Tourist, does not suck as much as you imagine.)
• Admission to the cable car at the Great Wall: about $10. T-shirt from a vendor at the Great Wall: 3 for $1. International roaming charges for the 2 minutes you use to call your wife from the Great Wall to tell her you love her and miss her? Priceless.
• The Wall is dotted with locals who are selling snacks, fruit and beverages. They sell from small milk crates, from hot-dog carts, from whatever they have. A number of them lead with "cold beer!" in English, which I think is strange - with this kind of climb, who wants to drink beer?
• It's easy to get vertigo up here.
• We ultimately walk the Wall from our arrival point to the 20th guard house (the end point of the zone), turn around and go back, past our arrival, and to the gondola. All told, it takes us about four hours. We take the gondola down, survive the tourist gantlet, and head back to Beijing. We are all smiling.
• All told, Beijing is incredibly clean. We see very little litter, and very few homeless. I am told that the government has been cleaning things up in advance of the Olympics.
• Olympics stuff is everywhere - banners, flags, logos, the mascots, billboards, bus boards, street signs. The city is swept with Olympics mania, and everyone is very happy and proud about it.
• A surprising number of signs come in English and Chinese. We see lots of Engrish.
• Hao and Fara take us to an expat district, which spans a river and has a healthy number of bars and nightclubs. Many of them have sofas and lounge chairs on the sidewalk, and are aggressive about getting you to sit down. We find a place that looks good, grab a table, and order some great local beer. It's outrageously expensive by Beijing standards, but about half the price of something comparable in the States. We watch gaggles of tourists zip by in the backs of rickshaws, taking in the sights.
• I want to by a t-shirt for Elaine, so Hao takes us to Plastered, which is a Beijing staple of hipness. I find her a super-cute white tee with a sketch of a Beijing subway ticket on it; I get myself an attractive blue number with "Kung Pao Chicken" written on it in Chinese. Hao assures me this is very, very, very funny.
• (Given some of the looks I get, I wonder if the shirt really says, "I'm a silly white guy who can't read Chinese", but the shirt is great, regardless.)
• Taxis in Beijing are mostly Hyundais, blue-and-gold Elantras. 2 yuan per km, 10 yuan minimum.
• After tromping around the dusty alleys of the city all afternoon, dinner is full-on culture shock - we go two blocks and find ourselves at a state-of-the-art shopping mall, all gleaming steel and glass, Starbucks and KFC, eleven stories, full of teenagers and cell phones and you name it. We could be anywhere in the States. We have some fantastic Chinese for dinner, knock back a couple of Tsingtaos, and call it a night.
• I sleep very, very, very well.

(If you're interested, I've posted a number of pictures from the trip to my Flickr Photostream.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer at July 22, 2008 9:00 PM. Posted to MSFT | Travel.

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