The West Commences: The Great Wall

We booked two trips to the Great Wall with Beijing Downtown Backpackers, one for Monday and the other on Thursday. The first hike, from Jinshanling to Simatai, was the longest and best, but they were both ‘great’ highlights of the week. A guy came to get the 5 of us at the hostel at 8:40. We followed him down our little street and then, like a consignment of drugs, we were passed on to another who led us to where the bus was parked; it was too big to go down our street. The drive to the start of the hike was about 2 hours long and took us through parts of Beijing and surrounding countryside that we would not have seen otherwise. Just before reaching our destination, we picked up another guy who turned out to be our sweep, to use the VOC term. There were not many people on this part of the wall, and we were free to go as we pleased for about 4 hours, one guide tried to stay in front and the other brought up the rear. It was a wonderful day and Jay and I were dressed for it and in the mood for a hike. We went up every tower and kept at the head of the pack, aside from 2 young men who had bought straw coolie hats from a hawker at the base. We could spot them easily and, if we lingered taking pictures, we would see their pointed heads just in front of us and put on a burst of speed to pass them again. The Jinshanling Great Wall is partly maintained but crumbling in places. It snakes along the very top of a chain of hills. At times you wonder why they even needed a wall to keep the Mongols out, but judging by the number of towers, it was well manned and facing it after a slog through woods and up and down hills would deter even a Tartar. The idea of building it is another whole area for wonder. It’s hard enough to hike, let alone lug stone and work on. The descent after tower 22 is a beautiful, steep and well-built walk. We rested at the bottom in the shade, drank cold drinks and I tried to unravel the mushroom dilemma, but with no success. At the top of one of the first towers we had seen an old man who was drying long yellow mushrooms on the window sill, and now on the stones in front of us a man had many of them spread out, presumably drying, and a woman with a big bag of them was scrubbing her blackened hands with water on the flat stones in front of the parking lot. They must be prized for some reason, but we never discovered why. We were happy to sit back in the bus and be driven home to the Peking Yard, where we showered, rested flat out on the beds and then went for dinner, not garlic eggplant.

The second Great Wall excursion, to Mutianyu Great Wall, was on Thursday. We were picked up again at 8:40am, but this time there were fewer of us in a van. The drive was only 11/2 hours long but took us through different parts of the Beijing area, including some pretty upscale housing areas between the city centre and the airport. We were mostly on a small road that was lined with trees, some exactly the same as the one the city planted in front of my house in Vernon, and passed through farmland. Jay and I decided to relax on this one; we took the cable car to tower 14 and walked from there to tower 22. The day began auspiciously as we went up in the same car that Bill Clinton had been in when he visited the wall in 1998. But it was a very overcast day, so we didn’t get a panoramic view until near the end when the sun appeared in a haze as we walked back to catch the cable car down. The wall at this point is not as varied as it was on the first trip. It’s better maintained, and we began by being a bit scornful and practically running because we wanted to get at least a bit of exercise and escape the noisy hoards. It was the Autumn Moon Festival while we were in China, and unlike the Jinshanling section, this one was crawling with Chinese, and, oddly enough, French tourists. We soon broke away from the real crowd and were sobered by the fact that the section between towers 17 and 22 was steep. It was more of a stair climb than a hike, but it was not a piece of cake. After the last maintained tower, it becomes a crumbling path of rubble, which we, and others, followed for a while. It made you appreciate the ravages of time because the restored part showed what a solid structure it had been and yet the centuries had worn it down to a barely visible line of stone at this part that had not been repaired. Some boys, inspired by the wild country and fog were making weird loud noises just beyond us. We had a deadline on this visit because there was a lunch included at a restaurant near the parking lot, so we turned around and headed down. There was a gauntlet of hawkers that we had to run before we got to lunch. This drove Jay crazy, but we made it, and then we sat down with others in our group and had a pretty good Chinese meal, with rice and about 8 different dishes. Eggplant has been a theme on this trip for me because May often just fries oriental eggplant in olive oil and we eat it with rice and whatever else she has made. It’s delicious. Then there was the garlic eggplant on our first night in Beijing and the best dish at this lunch was a mixture of eggplant and potato, which fortunately, I was the only one who really appreciated, so I ate a lot of it. The last part of the tour was a brief visit to the Olympic Birds’ Nest designed by Ai Weiwei. It and the setting it’s in are impressive. Sadly, the bird is now in a cage somewhere else in Beijing.

Jinshanling Great Wall

The old man on the tower. You can just make out his mushrooms, drying on the red window sill. He looks more like a Mongol than a Han Chinese, and that was the case with most of the hawkers on the Great Wall. Strange, considering the original purpose of the wall.