The Walliest Wall of Them All

The contrast between Beijing proper and the countryside just outside of the city is like night and day. All those classic images of craggy mountains and green vegetation can be found just a 30 minute drive outside of the traffic & smog-ridden cement jungle of Beijing.

On Saturday I headed off with Joyce and Scott, two office 'ambassadors' from the US to discover the China that appears in all the tourist brochures. Both Joyce and Scott spoke Chinese, which really helped move things along. We were so motivated that we got to the Great Wall before 8am, and were able to explore one of the tourist traps before it got too crowded, but by the time we left the wall was so packed that we had to squeeze down between vacationing chinese soldiers, old chinese ladies in high heels and 65-yr old Australians with canes.

There were super-kitch tourist souvenirs everywhere and your reward for making it about 100 feet up the wall was the opportunity to buy a 'certificate of climbing the Great Wall.' After we walked the wall we wandered around a temple that was right next to the parking lot full of tour buses, but there wasn't a single person in the entire temple. The temple had elaborate decorations and paintings and a fantastic view of the wall, but everyone was so single-minded ("wall, wall, wall") that they missed the best site.

Afterwards we went to a place called "The Commune by the Great Wall" which we had to make an appointment to see before we could even get in the front gate. The Commune was an architectural experiment in the 1990's where top architects from around Asia were each given a stipend to design a non-functional house. They did weird things like the "suitcase" house where all the living space is under the floor and accessible by latches (think, Soviet escape hatch = entire floor plan). There was another house called the "Bamboo" house where the entire structure was made out of bamboo and there was a seating area in the middle of a pond in the middle of the house where people could have tea. The property is now a luxury hotel where you can rent the houses for a mere 10,000 rmb a night (divide by 7 = dollars).

For the highest entry fee in all of china (120 rmb) we got a tour of a few of the houses, but more importantly (and worth the investment), we also got access to the property's private path to the Great Wall.

This part of the Great Wall was unrestored and empty. After passing an initial group of German tourists from the hotel, we had the wall entirely to ourselves. We wandered across it, climbed around, climbed through an empty watch tower that still had indentations from some sort of cannons that had attacked the fort at some point in ancient history. The weather was perfect (72, partly cloudy, breezy), and mountain jasmine was blossoming, which made the air smell like jasmine perfume (which smelled particularly nice compared to the metallic thick air in Beijing).

We climbed around for quite a while and marvelled at how awesome it was to be there and watch the wall snaking through the hills without anyone there to both us, and then headed back to the commune for lunch. We enjoyed margaritas and duck burgers (yummmm) and rested after several hours of climbing around on a big wall in inappropriate shoes and without stretching (not my greatest idea, as my feet almost fell off the next day when I had to spend 17 hours on airplanes).

We made a toast to "the walliest wall of them all," (copyright pending...) a term I came up with in a moment of inspiration while trying to climb up a particularly tall 4 ft tall slab of the wall.

After this we were so tired we reluctantly left the relatively clean air for the smog of Beijing, and all slept in the car on the way back. With a final wind, we went to the 'Ritan Office Building' which is an office building that has shops instead of desks inside of each little office. There were some amusingly bad fake designer items (like shoes with one brand on the heel and a fake Chanel symbol on the top), and some supposedly "real" items priced higher than you would pay new at Sak's. Thanks to stupid tourists who aren't aware of the exchange rate or how to bargain, the stores were generally unwilling to bargain, and we left empty-handed while the shop-keepers waited for more suckers to come in an buy extremely overpriced, questionably fake merchandise.

And with an early morning taxi ride, thus ended my final stop on this trip.

A few of final observations about Beijing and the surrounding areas:
1. The olympic venues are generally not finished yet. No matter what it takes, I'm sure they will get finished (if it involves hauling the entire population into the city to carry the bricks one by one, it wil be finished).
2. All people who are against environmental regulation should be required to spend a week in Beijing to see what the world will be like without controls on pollution. They should then be forced to run a marathon with their newly abused lungs.'
3. China is developing at a remarkable pace, and although their infrastructure is impressive in the city, it is still unable to handle the sheer volume of people. This should also be a message to us.

I am now in the US for a whole 4 days before I leave for 2.5 weeks in Hungary (Budapest), Romania (Transylvania), and Bulgaria (Sofia and the Black Sea). This time traveling will be for pleasure. Stay tuned for more to come in a few weeks.