Another Brick in the Wall pt.3 - Pink Floyd

Beijing Great Wall 064
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Bejing – March 17, 2007

It’s the first Saturday St. Paddy’s Day in 7 years and I’m stuck in a ‘gaming' café hoping my Couchsurfing host will show up. Turns out I printed a map with an old phone # and she was waiting for me at the apartment I had just been at. Aaah, the thrill of budget travel.

After finally meeting up and a few hours of playing boardgames it’s a nice dinner of spicy Kung Po chicken with a Tsing-Tao beer for my St. Patrick’s day meal.  No Guinness, no corned beef n cabbage, no Quiet Man screening and I wasn’t there for Nicole’s Birthday. Yeah, I was a bit depressed but at least I saw the sun for the first time in China. No blue sky though because of the pollution (from what I’ve seen the world better get on China’s arse about this Kyoto Global Warming treaty thing too) but at least it was warm for a day.

Beijing Great Wall 060
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Next day, the Forbidden City with the big old picture of Mao on the front gate. I really wonder what he thinks of the new commercialized China. Even this UNESCO ancient palace has sold out. There’s a Starbucks right in the middle. Some traditionalists complained so they took down the sign, but didn’t close it. I of course had to hunt it down and have a nice venti mocha. Not bad too. So the Forbidden City is a Ming Dynasty Royal palace and they weren’t kidding when the called it a city. The place is huge. My back was barking by the time I was done walking the place through. It was a Sunday with a ton of tourists and the cold/gray had returned so I didn’t pick the best time to visit. Still, it was an impressive site with beautiful architecture.

Beijing Tiananmen Square
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Across the road is Tian’anmen Square, which is the biggest open square of any city in the world. Also the most boring. Other than the constant memory in my head of that guy standing in front of the tank it’s not really worth visiting. That night I had a decent pizza in Houhai with my Couchsurfing host Stefanie who is just unbelievably kind and generous.

So now it’s off to the wall, the Great Wall. The never ending, see it from space myth, Great Wall of China. It should have been one of my trip highlights, but just like my first venture to the Pyramids, things don’t always work out as you would hope. There are closer, more touristy sections of the Wall that have been rebuilt but the Simatai section is supposed to be the best and most realistic, even if it meant a three hour bus ride each way. And oh man did I get realistic all right. When I booked the tour I asked them to check the weather to make sure it wasn’t going to rain that Monday. Absolutely no rain they said. They were right. It snowed instead. The plan was to hike 10 kilometers along the wall for about 4 hours. A medium-rough hike in good weather. Insanity in the snow. We had to climb up a mountain first, with a perfectly good chairlift they wouldn’t turn on taunting me from above, just to get to the Wall. Then we go to the entrance and the guard won’t let half the group up because they had the wrong tickets. Naturally our Chinese guide had disappeared at that point and the guard wants us to ‘slide’ back down the snowy trail to get the right tickets. Yeah, right.  After a few cell calls we finally were allowed up.

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You know all the pictures of the Wall rolling off into the distant hills? They were all taken right where I was, but not in a friggin blizzard. It was snowing like crazy the first two hours. I couldn’t see a thing even if I tried, but I was too  concerned with climbing up and down the insanely steep steps to look around anyway. I was cold, wet and out of breath almost the whole time, but so was everyone else and there was definitely a camaraderie there. But of course I found a way to have the Wall to myself at times when I stopped to take some pictures, which was cool and eerie in the clouds all alone, but this time I preferred the misery loves company rule and caught up with some folks as fast as I could.

Beijing Great Wall 073
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When we first arrived at the hiking portion the bus driver offered us an out, saying we could bus the 10k and just hike the easy sections near Simatai. Only one Aussie with sandals opted out yet I was this close to doing the same until my pride got the better of me. The first hour I cursed myself for not baling but after a while I realized that very few people in the world have ever seen, yet alone hiked the Great Wall of China in the snow, so I stuck to the sunny side of the experience for the rest of the way. And it really was an experience. Some of the sections were so beat up, steep and slippery I was definitely worried me or a compatriot would take a hard fall and bumpy slide down. There were local ‘guides’ that usually hung out on the wall selling things. With the snow they were safety nets, helping people up and down the crazier sections, saving a broken kneecap one second and immediately following the good deed with ‘you buy postcaad, maybe lata?’. Plenty of folk bought postcards and more. All our pictures came out like crap anyway.

Beijing Great Wall 070
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Well, to end my little soujourn I was told a Chinese saying that a man cannot become a hero until he walks the Great Wall. Well, I’m no hero (except to Jimmy Plain) but I’ve walked the Great Wall in the worst of conditions and can leave China early for the warmth of the south with no regrets.

Zaijian,

Bill