If you haven’t noticed already, when I plan adventures I
tend to pick an already somewhat crazy destination/activity and then pick an
extreme version. For instance, it wasn’t
enough to just go see elephants in Thailand or Laos. I picked the option that involved manual
labor – dehusking rice and “helping” the elephants take a mudbath.
So, obviously, when it came time to visit the Great Wall,
the normal tourist way wouldn’t work for me.
I didn’t want to go to the most popular part of the wall, where 99% of
tourists go. I don’t like crowds in
general and crowds in China can be especially overwhelming for me. Simon and I considered signing up for the
Great Wall Marathon in May, but pictures we saw from the event showed
absolutely miserable participants. (Plus
it was CRAZY expensive for foreigners.
They make you sign up for a whole week trip in Beijing, whether you want
to or not!)
I learned about camping on the Great Wall from a “nature inChina” blog I found back in March. When
I spoke with another expat working in Shanghai at Nike, she said she had done it with a
tour company and highly recommended it.
So 10 days ago, I signed up to camp on the Great Wall this weekend. I
purchased roundtrip train tickets and my adventure was set!
My trip started at 8p on Friday night, when I boarded an
overnight train in Shanghai and met my cabinmates for the evening. There was an older Shanghaiese couple and a
well-educated, professional woman who is originally from Beijing but
has lived in Shanghai for many years.
The older couple went to bed almost immediately and I stayed up for a
few hours getting work done and watching an episode of TV on my laptop. Around midnight I closed my eyes and when I
woke up it was light again outside the train.
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| My "hotel" room for the evening. I had a top bunk but it was surprisingly comfortable |
Before the train arrived in Beijing, the older couple asked
me a few questions about myself and thankfully the other woman helped
translate. The couple was speaking
Shanghaiese, so even if I did know Mandarin I still wouldn’t have understood
them. A couple times I tried to guess
what they were asking me and I usually got it wrong. It made me wish Simon was there, because I
have been so impressed with his ability to connect with locals in situations
like this where they can’t really communicate with each other. The older couple had a chuckle when they
learned I worked for Nike and then noticed that literally everything I was
wearing was Nike. I said “uniform”, and
they seemed to get that and think it was funny.
The other woman and I realized we were also on the same train back to
Shanghai and exchanged contact info in case we’d run into each other again.
The train arrived in Beijing at 8a and from there I took two
metro lines to get to the meeting point for the hike. My first impression of Beijing was that it
was much less developed/less Western than Shanghai, but I was only seeing a
small sliver of the city. I stopped in
to a western coffee shop to get on WiFi for a few minutes, buy some cold water
(it was already over 90 degrees), and use the restroom. Then I met up with the hiking group and away
we went.
I slept for almost all of the 2.5-hour drive to the parking
lot. The restless sleep I had gotten the
night before was catching up with me and I needed my energy to climb the wall. During the moments I was awake, I started to
notice hills that turned into mountains, and every once in a while a line on
the mountain that ended up being a stretch of the great wall. I felt like the mountains were calling to me
(being a Vermonter) and was so glad that I was going to get to spend some time
in them.
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| See the wall all the way on top of the mountain? |
After parking the car, the trip leaders distributed our
backpacks, each with a tent, sleeping bag, and sleeping mat for spending the
night on the wall. I was really nervous that
my bag was not going to fit well but it ended up being pretty comfortable and
pretty light. After putting my clothes
and toiletries in the pack, I strapped it on my back and away we went through a
nice looking gate whose words I couldn’t read (surprise surprise).
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| Artsy shadow pic of my and my backpack |
The guide had warned us that it was a steep, steady climb up
to the wall and he wasn’t kidding!
Between the nearly 100 degree heat, the strong sun, the humidity, and
air pollution it was a challenging hike.
Plus there were many places where the brush had overgrown the trail,
leading to many scratches and stinging nettle-type situations. Like all trails I’ve been on in China, this
one was paved although with less permanent materials than the trails in
Zhangjiajie. The good news was that
everyone else on the trip was really fun to talk to and it helped distract me
from the effort I was putting in. I felt
very at home on a hiking trail and found I had a lot of things in common with
my tripmates. Some were from Iowa,
others loved craft beer, and still others had found a way to out-do my
adventurousness, having just arrived in Beijing on the Trans-Siberian Railway
from Moscow! It was such an unexpected and wonderful feeling to have that sense
of instant connection with people I’d only met minutes before.
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| Which way is the trail? |
Each time we took a break, I looked up and could tell the
wall was getting closer and closer. Just
when I thought I couldn’t take it anymore, we made it to the first watchtower
and took a nice long rest. The views
from the top were stunning. I guess I
never paid much attention to pictures of the great wall but I had no idea how
winding it was. The mountainous
landscape required the architects to make the wall zig and zag so that it would
be an effective defense against the potential Mongol invaders. Sometimes it curved so much (and the valleys
were so deep) that it was hard to even tell how all the pieces I could see
connected together.
From the first watch tower, we started walking on top of the
wall and our pace was often slowed by our guide stopping to disrupt the spider
webs in our path. We followed the wall
as it dipped down into a valley and then up to the highest point of our trip. From there we followed the wall down another
ridge and eventually reached the two watchtowers that became our campsite for
the night. We arrived around 5p, drank a
cold beer provided by the tour guides, set up our tents, and waited for our
guides to cook dinner.
However, before that could happen, I noticed some lightening
in the distance and the wind started to pick up. Our views of the other peaks nearby started
to be obscured and there was just that feeling in the air that a storm was
coming. (Plus I had checked the weather
the day before and it said there was a 70% chance of rain that evening). Thankfully our tents were set up, so we just
crowded into the watchtower and made good on its name – watching the storm roll
in. I love storms and couldn’t have
asked for a more memorable way to spend an hour on the great wall. And, I didn’t worry about getting struck by
lightning in the watchtower given that it was built 500 years ago with no
metal.
It took about an hour for the storm to roll through and by
then we were all very hungry. Our guides
converted some stones from the wall into a fire pit and started cooking up a
stirfry-type dinner from cabbage, onions, and eggs. After dinner I was the second person to bed,
but the rest were not far behind. We
were supposed to have s’mores but the guides couldn’t find the
marshmallows. Nevertheless, it was a
chance for intercultural sharing as some of the Europeans on the trip had never
heard of this and the Americans educated them about how to make one and how
good it tasted. I also learned a new recipe I am eager to try: replace the bar
of chocolate with a Reeses peanut butter cup!
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| Pretty impressive way to hide the fire pit the morning after. You can see some white ash on the left side if you look close |
This morning, I woke up on the great wall! The mountains were stunning and the sky was
blue. We packed up our bags and hiked away
from the wall on a side trail leading to a second parking lot where our van was
parked. We then drove to a “farm house”
(like a country restaurant for day-trippers) and ate a local style breakfast. From there, the group split in two, with some
going to a second part of the wall and some, like me, headed back to Beijing in
order to catch our planes or trains tonight or tomorrow morning.
Once we arrived in Beijing we all said goodbye and went our
separate ways. I offered everyone our
spare bedroom in Portland if they ever want to come visit and I hope I will see
my tripmates again! I used one of my new
friends’ itinerary and picked 2 spots to visit during the 6 hours before my
train: the National Musuem of China and the Temple of Heaven.
The National Museum was very large and unfortunately the
English audio guides weren’t working so there wasn’t much I could understand as
95% of the signage was in Mandarin.
However, the “Road to Rejuvenation” exhibit (covering China’s rise from
the 1850s to today) had slightly more English in it and was fascinating to see
how China tells its own history. In
particular, it reminded me of the Propaganda Poster Museum Simon and I went to
in Shanghai, where we learned that sometimes pieces of art were redrawn with a
person added or removed depending on how their political fortunes changed. This painting was a key piece of the exhibit,
and I found myself wondering if it was the original or a modified version to match
with today’s version of yesterday’s history.
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| Check out the very bottom. What exactly is a "moderately prosperous" society and why is "moderate" prosperity the goal? |
The Temple of Heaven was many of my hiking friends’ favorite
tourist spot in Beijing so it was my second stop before the train home. I initially shied away from it because I
thought it was just a big public park but everyone loved it and it was close to
the train station so I figured I’d check it out. The audio guide WAS available for this one so
I had a semi-narrated tour during my 2 hour visit. Religion in China is something I still don’t
really understand because I’ve heard so many contradictory things. On the one hand, I hear “religion is banned”,
but then I visit temples in Shanghai and there are people there
worshipping. My colleagues told me there
are gods, but they aren’t religious gods and I can’t seem to
puzzle through that one. People on my trip
said they learned that religion is a no-no here because the government wants
Chinese citizens to feel that the government has supreme authority, not any
higher powers. I know that there is a
United Church of Christ church in Shanghai and you can only go if you have a
foreign passport.
All of these contradictions made my visit to the Temple of
Heaven even more interesting. It’s a very large compound of buildings all
related to religious rituals that Chinese emperors from the 1500s to 1700s practiced,
involving periods of fasting, animal sacrifice, and lots of prayer. I noticed that usually the audio guide talked
about prayer to “heaven” rather than prayer to “gods”. And there was one moment where the guide
talked about how the ruling class used to say that a certain spot had special
powers because the speaker’s voice would be amplified but that that was just a
way for the ruling class to hold onto its power and that it was really just a
matter of physics. It’s ironic, because
there are many things the government does today to keep control of power, but
today’s government likes pointing out when yesterday’s government was choosing
a certain version of the truth for its own benefit.
Throughout the Temple of Heaven, there were many local and
foreign tourists there for the first time. However,
there was another set of folks for whom the Temple of Heaven was more like a
public park than a historical site.
There were many older adults playing card games and some other types of
games I didn’t recognize. The Temple of
Heaven area was very quiet, not nearly as crowded as I might have expected, and
I can imagine I’d go almost every weekend if I lived in Beijing instead of
Shanghai.
But it was time to get back to Shanghai and my feet were
tired from 16 miles of walking. So I hopped on the subway, recharged my phone
and laptop at a Starbucks, and waited for my 5 hour train to Shanghai to
board. As I got to my seat, I was amazed to find the nice woman from Friday night who I shared a train compartment with. In a country of one billion people, it was an amazing coincidence to meet someone, remember them, and then see them again 48 hours later. As I write this, my train is
going 307 kilometers per hour and I’ve got about 30 minutes left on the train
ride. I’m excited to fall asleep in what I’ve
come to know as my own bed, after a night on a train and a night on the great
wall. And so glad that my sense of adventure led me to yet another new place I
never knew I’d get to.
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