Day 11 - The Great Wall of China

Day 11 – His.

 

We got up at 5 in the morning – the jet lag has yet to settle down. They didn’t start serving breakfast until 7 so we showered shaved – (Legs for Patti, face for me) – and went down to discover we weren’t being provided breakfast! – not something we bothered to check – which just goes to show the dangers of assumption. So we went out and got hold of some breads and had them in the room as we were due to meet with the rest of the guys at 8.

 

We love Gecko tours! – in fact if they asked us to recommend them we would – they don’t ask so we do it anyway. I am unsure how many tours we have been on with them but it’s been a few and we find them to be a good match with what we are looking for. The guides they provide seem to be cut from a very similar cloth. They are helpful, kind, knowledgeable and organised – what more could you want. Our current guide is a woman called Tory. She has a real Chinese name but she seems to prefer this so we just call her Tory. I guess it’s better than hey you. But she is a real sweetheart. She gathered us together whipped us onto the small coach she had arranged and got us to the great wall with a minimum of fuss and a lot of explanation of the political, cultural and social history of China – really quite fascinating.

 

Apparently there are five sections of the great wall you can visit. Three of them are rubbish and of the two good ones left one is heavily visited and the other – the one we went to – less well visited – the idea was it would be more enjoyable to go somewhere there were fewer tourists. A nice idea – but only in theory. There was a very good reason the section we visited was less well visited. It was one of the mountain sections. We took the cable car to tower 14 and climbed up to tower 21 which took us 2 and half hours of continuous climbing. It seems the ancient Chinese weren’t that interested in meandering about when it came to great walls. If they wanted to go in a straight line, well, they went in a straight line and to hell with any hills in the way. In order to get up the hills they quite simply put steps in. There must have been thousands of steps. We struggled up as the sun rose and the day got hotter and the steps got slicker from the sweat of exhausted, fat tourists struggling upwards in an almost inexorable march to heaven. I have discovered the Chinese are actually extremely romantic, especially in their literature and music – so the march to heaven seems to fit.

 

It had been Tory’s suggestion to take water and something to eat up to tower 21 – ‘there will be less people up there.’ She had said.

 

She was right, mostly because it was the highest point and reached only by climbing two sets of impossibly angled steps of over 400 steps each. The steps were at such an angle that you couldn’t walk down them and one enterprising couple of Australians we passed were in fact sliding back down them on their backsides. We settled for climbing back in the same way we ascended. Much more like ladders of rock than steps.

 

At the top several wizened Chinese women tried to ingratiate themselves to us by applauding our efforts and then trying to sell us iced water and ice creams. A good trick and taken up by many as we really did nothing all the way up but sweat.

 

To be honest it was absolutely worth it. The view from the top of the wall we had walked along and the surrounding countryside was truly breathtaking. In more ways than one as we were gasping and puffing like mad when we reached the top! But words really can’t describe it and Tory’s adage that you cannot say you have been to china if you haven’t visited the wall is true. The countryside, mountains, trees and wall set in the hazy sunny day really seemed to encapsulate what this country is about. This is one experience that has to be on everybody’s bucket list and if it isn’t there add it!

 

Unfortunately the descent is almost as hard as the ascent and wobbly leg syndrome soon sets in as you scramble down. We walked down to tower 8 and took the exit through the woods as we realised that getting the cable car (which had been Tory’s suggestion) was, in fact, the best way to do this. If we hadn’t taken the car we would have given up at tower 10. The climb down the mountainside, through the woods, though well paved, would have just been too arduous given the time we had to do this walk. As it was we reached our designated meeting point with 5 minutes to spare, collapsed onto the coach and drove back to Beijing.

 

Once we got back we went for dumplings with Tory and paid only 14 Yuan (about £1.40) for a really good meal. The third really great discovery of the day (The first being the wall, the second being the dumplings) was instant coffee at a local supermarket. It is truly amazing how much you miss the little things.

 

So, we went back to the hotel, tired, but happy little bears for a coffee and a sleep and to rest our tired little legs for the next day’s adventure.

 

Day 11- Hers

The drive out to the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall was fascinating in itself. First, getting to know our companions a bit: 2 young Australians, an American from Ohio who is teaching English in Japan and a PhD student from Lehore in Pakistan. Our guide, Tory, is from a tiny village near Xian but now lives in a larger city nearby.  We compared experiences of how the world has opened up to those adventurous enough to travel and listened to Tory’s explanation of the huge changes in China in just the past 25 years.

 

The scenery, too, was fascinating. The trees, even in heavily wooded areas, were planted in rows and painted for the first few feet up from the bottom.  Canals and manmade lakes provided fishing and picnic spots. The two golf courses we passed were very green and looked challenging – one also had a very grandiose entrance, a colonnade fit for an emperor – though both looked quite empty of players.  It has been one of the surprising facts that so many areas of this city of 20 million have so much green space and so few people – quite different from Hong Kong.

We passed sculpture parks – traditional lions and art deco-style horses – and fields of corn and fruit, with roadside stands selling an amazing array of produce.  We also passed a variety of residential areas: high rise blocks of flats and quite recently built houses in a very Western style.

 

The street lights are all individually powered by solar units – which interested Rob – ‘micro generation on a macro scale’, he called it.  We spent a bit of time trying to decipher the Chinese characters on signs, reasonably successfully for those that were repeated enough (e.g. Beijing and Exit...), and learning a few phrases from Tory  – hi, how are you?, thank you and no being the most useful.  Tory then made us use the phrases in the restaurant – she ordered the dumplings to make sure we got what we were expecting but we had to keep the free green tea (cha) flowing.  It is interesting to note that the tea is free (as long as they don’t ask you first what kind you want) but if you open the packet on the table that includes the cup, they charge you 1 yuan.  Still, that’s only about 10p and you can have the teapot filled as many times as you want.

 

Along the path to and from the entrance to the Great Wall, dozens of vendors had stalls selling tourist tat and overpriced bananas – we were greatly reminded of the souks in Tunisia by the aggressive sales techniques.  It seemed a strange sort of capitalism to find in a communist country – but Tory told us that current thinking is that ‘A black cat or a white cat – if it catches the mouse, it is a good cat’ so they seem to be quite happy with anything that helps them develop economically.