I consulted Daniel. “We want to do the hike from Jinshanling to Simatai,” I said. “Do you know a driver I can hire for the day?”
“It’s pretty expensive,” he said. “You can take the subway and the bus and then take a minibus or a taxi instead. It‘s pretty easy, I think.”
I looked at him skeptically. “I don’t know. Write it down. What do I have to do?”
He took a rectangular card with an American flag printed on one side, turned it over, and wrote down the instructions. “Take the subway to Dongshimen. Then take the #980 bus to Miyun. Get off and take a minibus or taxi to Jinshanling.”
I was still concerned. I had heard that taking the bus was difficult because everything is in Chinese and you can’t tell when your stop is. “How will I know when to get off the bus?” I asked.
He waved his hand. “Get off at Miyun. I think it’s at the end of the line.”
I took the card and decided to give it a try.
Because of our previous experience at Juyongguan, I decided that we should be more prepared, so we went to the tiny corner market to pick up some bottles of water. There are many stores in Beijing that sell drinks, but most of the bottles will only be slightly colder than room temperature. Either the refrigeration systems don’t work well, or the Chinese don’t like their drinks cold. We discovered that the woman at the corner keeps her drinks in an ice-cold bath; sometimes the sodas even have a little frozen ice inside. It’s like heaven on a hot day.
“Water,” I told her and pointed to some bottles. She spoke no English, but kept a neat arrangement of all the drinks on shelves along the walls. There really was no store, she just had an open booth.
She nodded and got a bottle of cold water. “How much?” I asked, but she could not explain the price to me. A Chinese guy in his teens or twenties jumped up to interpret. After a little back and forth, he told me, “One point five. A water is one point five yuan.”
“I want eight bottles,” I said and held up eight fingers.
This caused some more conversation and some amusement as well. I could tell she was thinking, “Eight! Who wants eight bottles of water?”
Back at the hostel, I packed four bottles in Kinsey’s backpack and four in mine, along with a few Clif Bars I had brought from the U.S., two chocolate croissants, and a loaf of garlic bread. Chinese breakfasts are not my favorite, so we had been piecing together whatever we could find. I figured that it would take two hours or more to get to Jinshanling, so we should get up and leave as early as possible. I set my alarm for 6:30 am.
The next morning I overslept a little and got us up at 7 am. We dressed quickly. Today I dressed in shorts, knowing there was no way I could endure all that climbing in long pants. Then we headed for the subway, munching on garlic bread as we went. At Dongshimen, we exited and looked for the bus station, which was pretty easy to find. As I was looking around, trying to get a feel for the layout of the station, a middle-aged Chinese woman came up to me.
“Simatai?” she said loudly, but in a friendly manner.
“Jinshanling,” I replied.
She replied with a long string of Chinese with the words Simatai and Jinshanling thrown in and motioned to the left and back of the station. I nodded, thanked her, and started walking in that direction. She continued to follow, speaking to me in rapid Chinese. Now, the thing about the Chinese is that they are often very forceful talkers, so that everything they say seems to sound very urgent. Perhaps it’s just the nature of the language, which has a lot of hard consonants, instead of the wispy vowels that sound more elegant or deferential. In any event, the urgency of her Chinese caused me to break into a run, thinking that the bus would be leaving soon and I should hurry. The woman kept pace, still talking loudly, and she made motions with her hands on her chest that I interpreted as “Don’t rush, you’re going to have a heart attack!” But now I was confused, not knowing whether to hurry or slow down. I could see the bus ahead, so I kept running for the line. Eventually, we all stopped, and I could see there was no rush--one bus was pulling out, but another was coming in right behind it. We tried to talk some more, and I think she understood that we were going to walk from Jinshanling to Simatai.
The bus itself was pretty nice with comfortable seats, no smoking, and a television that ran endless loops of Chinese commercials without sound. After the bus started going, a conductor walked around and collected money for the tickets. Ours cost 15 yuan each. Many of the people on the bus seemed to know each other. We passed through Beijing, making only one stop to pick up passengers and then continued out into the countryside, mostly past farms and orchards or great swaths of trees.
Eventually we came to the second stop, and a few people got off and a few were getting on. Since this didn’t seem to be the last stop, I wasn’t too concerned. Suddenly, a Chinese man boarded the bus and came straight to us.
“Simatai!” he said, very loudly. “Jinshanling!” And he motioned to us. But for some reason, the motion for “come” was to put his arm straight out with the palm open--like “stop.” So I froze. Who was this, and what was I supposed to do? Stay? Get off?
But the man kept yelling “Simatai” and “Jinshanling” so I grabbed my backpack and told Kinsey that perhaps we should get off. I looked for the woman who had been so helpful at the bus station but I couldn’t see her.
We got off onto the dusty side of the road. There was a little strip of shops and a cluster of middle-aged Chinese men. The man who had pulled us from the bus, motioned us over to the clump of men. He pulled out a piece of paper and a pen and began to draw.
“Miyun,” he said and wrote down the name in English. Then he drew an arrow to another point and wrote Jinshanling. “Jinshanling to Simatai,” he said, and drew a short line. Then he drew another line from Simatai back to Miyun. There was a brief pause . He looked at me, tapped the map with his pen, and said, “320 yuan,” simultaneously writing it on the paper. All the men in the group looked at me expectantly.
“You’re going to take us to Jinshanling in your car,” I said. “Okay. 320 yuan.” All the men in the group seemed to let out a collective breath. The transaction was done and I hadn’t even haggled. I suppose I could have, but the value of things in China is a difficult concept for me to grasp. So many things go for so little, that I have no good idea of what is fair.
We got in the car and started off, passing through the town. At one point, I did see a sign that said “Miyun” in English, so I was satisfied that I had a least gotten out at the right town. But as we were driving along, it started to occur to me that we were at the mercy of this man, out in the middle of nowhere, a huge language barrier, and no idea where we were really going. I didn’t really feel unsafe, but I realized that we were totally relying on his better nature.
The drive took somewhere around an hour. We passed the exit for Simatai and headed up toward Jinshanling. At one point, the driver pulled in front of a local restaurant and motioned to me. It turned out that the entirety of his English was in his initial Simatai/Jinshanling spiel, and he really knew almost nothing else.
I looked at the the restaurant confused. The signs were all in Chinese, so I couldn’t tell what it was. “Is this it?” I asked.
He could tell I was confused. He thought a moment and brought out another English word. “Lunch.”
“No, no,” I said. “No lunch.”
He drove on. A little while later we arrived at Jinshanling. Along the way, I had been thinking about payment. My Lonely Guide had clearly outlined that you should not pay for the round trip at the beginning or you may not have a ride home. I was just about to broach the subject, when the driver brought it up himself.
“Miyun-Jinshanling. 200 yuan. Simatai-Miyun. 120 yuan.”
This seemed fair, so I forked over the 200 yuan.
Then the driver grabbed my wrist and pointed to my watch. “Jinshanling to Simatai,” he said, and ticked off the hours. Four hours to hike, which should bring us in at about 3 pm. Then he said, “Bus,” and wrote 17:00 on his piece of paper. “Ah!” I said, “the bus leaves at five.” And I pointed to the five on the watch. He nodded, satisfied that I understood the gravity of making this schedule, although in reality I knew there had to be more buses than that.
We got out and went to buy tickets. As we entered, I could tell that Jinshanling was not a big stop on the tourist route. There were only a few hikers standing nearby, and the parking lot was nearly deserted.
Kinsey and I made a quick stop at the bathroom and stopped to pick up drinks. At the last minute, I stopped to look at some of the vendor stalls and haggled to buy a wide-brimmed straw hat. The vendor also had some walking sticks, aluminum high-tech poles that gave a slight compression when used. After some dithering, and a fair amount of haggling, I walked off with a walking stick, wondering if this was going to be useful or a nuisance.
Suddenly, the driver was at our side again. “Come,” he said, “Tram.”
“There’s a tram?” I said. Now I was confused. Apparently, here’s where Lonely Planet got it completely wrong. The guidebook had said that Simatai had a tram, but there was no mention of one for Jinshanling. At a brisk pace, the driver led us up the path toward the tram. I think he was afraid we would never get going and would get back late. We paid another fee for the tram and headed through the turnstile. Just as we were leaving the driver called to us again and made a motion with his hand, turning left. This I understood instantly. One of the guidebooks I had read had mentioned quite helpfully that you must turn left when you come to the wall. If you accidentally go right, you will travel on a spur that ends and then you will have to turn around to go the correct way. I nodded and waved, and we were off.
As we got up to the tram, I could see that the tram was going, but there was no one riding the cars and no one seemed to be around.
“I guess we just get in,” I said to Kinsey, and I jumped into a tram car with her right behind.
“But how do we close the door?” she cried out, and at the last possible second, someone emerged from the booth and shut the door.
At the top, we managed to disembark the same way…with someone leaping out of the booth to unlatch the door. Then we were off to the trail. Almost immediately, we were accosted by some Chinese women. I had heard about this from my guidebooks as well, that there would be people who follow you persistently and want you to buy their souvenirs or water. The women who first accosted us were fairly persistent, but not aggressive. They tried to make small talk, and they tried to tell us interesting facts about the wall. The best thing they told me was that for the walk from Jinshanling to Simatai, we would have to pass through 30 towers. After telling them repeatedly that I didn’t want any souvenirs, I finally told them we wanted to walk alone. After a little distance, they seemed to understand and drifted off.
Alone, however, was a fleeting concept. Vendors congregated at every single tower, so getting to a tower was both a joy (another one ticked off!) and a gauntlet of sorts. Meanwhile, Chinese women wanting to act as guides would walk along the wall looking for hikers to accost.
The wall itself, though, was all it should have been--broken down and wild, lots of missing bricks, areas where you had to climb around…and pretty much deserted of tourists. I never thought there were areas that were unstable or dangerous. It was all just pretty natural. We saw a lot of lizards, beetles, grasshoppers, and wildflowers. Through the entire hike, we saw only two other groups of hikers, though at the end at Simatai, I saw quite a few more.
The climb itself is pretty hard, though our experience at Juyogguan served me well, as there was no section that was as grueling as Juyogguan. I later learned that most of the hard hiking is from Jinshanling to just past the halfway point. Just after the midpoint, the trail has much more gentle ups and downs, and in general, is traveling on a downward slope. It also becomes easier because the government is in the process of rebuilding Simatai, so the trail near Simatai is completely redone and much easier to navigate.
Meanwhile, though, we were still toiling up and down the wall at Jinshanling. The day was cooler than it had been, with a light cool breeze. Still the sun was hot, and the exertion made me sweat terrifically. The walking stick turned out to be a huge help, but the hat only made my head sweaty, so I had Kinsey tie it to my backpack. When we got to one of the first few towers, I got a brilliant idea and bought a bottle of water from a vendor. He was trying to get us to buy some and mentioned that it had ice. In fact, the bottle must have started out as solid ice and had melted some, but there was still a nice core inside. So I bought the water and after we drank it all, I refilled it with some of the water we were carrying. We probably got three cold bottles out of one.
Then we were joined again by the two women we had met at the beginning of the trail. At this point I had softened up a little. It was clear that no matter what, we weren’t really going to be alone on the wall. There were just too many Chinese vendors and guides prowling around. Plus, these women had a way of just worming their way in. At difficult passages, they would help Kinsey, taking her hand. Sometimes on large steps up they would help pull us up. As a woman traveling alone with a child, it actually seemed to be comforting after awhile, and I decided to just accept that they would be coming along. We tried to talk, but like our driver, many of the things they said were memorized and I think they really understood very little.
If what they said was true, I learned that they were from Mongolia and were poor farmers. The rest I believe is true. During one water break, I asked them if they were mothers. They had asked if I had more children, and I told them one, a boy. They liked that, having a boy and a girl. Then one of the women told me she had two children, a boy and a girl. I asked the second woman, who looked much younger, if she also had children. She said, yes, two. I said, “A boy and a girl?” She nodded and we all laughed, but at that moment, it did seem as if we were all just mothers together. We talked about ages, hers and mine. They complimented Kinsey. They told us what they could about the wall, pointing out bricks with names stamped on the side, guiding us around the towers that were impassable, and generally helping whenever they could. In some ways, having them along helped the process too. Once we were “claimed” they kept the other vendors at bay, which made the towers a little more bearable. I’m sure they’ve done the same for all the other tourists they’ve met, but I learned that the difference was mine. I could have been begrudging but I wasn’t, and the experience turned from something that I might have considered a nuisance into something that made the hike itself even better.
At some point, along the wall, I decided that I would give the women a tip. I’m not one for souvenirs, but I appreciated what they had done. Just past the midpoint in the hike, the women stopped and tried to explain to me that they were not going any farther and asked me to buy some souvenirs. I told them to show me what they had. Perhaps I should have bought some, but I told them I wanted to give them a tip instead. For helping. And I demonstrated how they had helped Kinsey up and down the wall. I think they understood, although they seemed a little chagrined.
The rest of the hike was done in near complete solitude. The vendors and the guides seemed to understand that this part of the wall was too easy to warrant help. There were still vendors in many of the towers, but far fewer, and less aggressive. With easier climbing and no guides, Kinsey started to slow down, stopping frequently to take pictures. Near the end, a tour group caught up and passed us.
At the end of the hike, we crossed a suspension bridge and then had one last hard climb up. That very last climb very nearly did me in. We made it up slowly, had our customary celebratory ice cream, and wandered over to see the zipline. We watched several people glide over the river we had just crossed on the bridge. I couldn’t understand what you would do on the other side of the river, so I kept asking the ticket seller how you would get back to the parking lot. Finally, she explained that there is a boat ride back across the river. After much dithering, Kinsey and I decided to do the zipline…it was only 45 yuan each. Unfortunately, the woman decided to send us together. I think she was afraid that Kinsey was so light that she would travel too slowly. So we were hooked together and cast off, clutching each other, and spinning out of control. After the quick boatride, we dragged ourselves up the walk to the parking lot, where we found our driver sitting in the shade and talking to a group of men. We were right on time.
The ride back to Miyun was much shorter. I think he must have taken some shortcuts because the roads didn’t look familiar to me. After a bit he dropped us at the parking lot in Miyun. I pulled out my wallet to pay, and our driver gave me a quick bit about a parking charge at Simatai--20 extra yuan. I figured that was a song and dance, but taxi drivers in China don’t get tips anyway, so I gave him the 20 yuan without comment. Then I tried to ask him his name, but he couldn’t understand the question, so I gave up and asked him if I could take his picture instead. He nodded and I took a picture of him standing by his car, and then he waved us over to the bus.
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