“Badaling?” he asked, and promptly suggested another part of the Wall. Badaling is the most heavily touristed spot on the Great Wall, completely reconstructed, and not at all what the guidebooks call “wild.”
But, I was interested in seeing several sections of the Great Wall in order to compare them and Badaling was on my list. I explained that we’d be going to other parts, so Daniel gave up and told me he could get a tour--and at a very cheap price, 160 yuan for me and 100 yuan for Kinsey. The tour included Badaling, the Ming Tombs, admission to both, plus lunch. What a bargain!
One of the hardest parts about communication is that in order to feel confident that I know what is going to happen, I have to ask an inordinate number of questions: how much will everything cost, where will the tour pick us up, when will they come--and often I feel like I have to ask everything twice in order to make sure we both understand. Even then, there are a lot of things that go unsaid.
True to Daniel’s word, the minibus came for us the next morning, showing up around 8 am. The clerk on duty walked us out of the hutong and down the main street to some appointed place. The minibus approached and we were greeted effusively by a tall Chinese man in black rectangular glasses, who spoke English very well. I still wasn’t sure exactly what was happening, but we got onto the minibus, which had several people already inside: a middle-aged man from New Zealand with a 7-year-old Chinese daughter, two Indian men, and a rotund American man (who I later learned was from Florida) and who was accompanied by a Chinese woman (who I later surmised was neither a wife nor a girlfriend…). We later picked up two young Japanese women.
Eventually the guide introduced himself as an English major, a former interpreter who had sat in a corner office playing video games and reading books until the need arose for his skills. He painted his life as rather dull, and so he fled his cubicle for life as a tour guide. His patter was pretty straightforward, but he was funny in a dry way, and he sometimes mocked the ways of China, particularly their poor manufacturing. However, at one point, he started talking about politics.
“Communism is very good for China,” he said. “We are a very intelligent people. We have many opinions. And there are so many of us with so many opinions, that we must have communism to keep control or else everything will be a mess.” There was a very short pause, and he continued, “At least for now, communism is best for China.”
I found his statement to be quite interesting. I have heard it before from another Chinese friend…nearly word for word it seems. Perhaps it is the party line?
The minibus rolled on. We passed the Olympic sites--the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube. Then, the guide mentioned that we would be going to the Ming Tombs first, and he laid out the rules. We were all to stick together. He would tell us about each site. We were not to stray.
And so I got a glimpse of what tour life would have been like. We were shepherded through the Tomb sites, missing the long walk through the Spirit Way, the entry path that was lined with statues and was apparently the best part of the site, according to one of my guidebooks. We also did not get to go into the tomb…and the guide conveniently did not mention that they were even open. He did give us some good insight into the things we did see, but I could see right then, that tour life 24/7 would have really grated on me. The absolute one thing that annoys me about tours is that I like to be able to stay somewhere as long as I like and see the things I want to see. Fortunately, I had chosen the Badaling/Ming sites as a tour because I knew it wouldn’t matter tremendously to me if we missed parts or not.
Back to the minibus, and the guide announced that we would be going to the Jade Factory and having lunch.
“Lunch?” Kinsey said. It was barely 10:30.
“Jade Factory?” I said. This had not been mentioned at all, but I was not completely surprised as I had heard in the guidebooks that tours did this sort of thing.
Off we went to the Jade Factory to see a three-minute jade presentation and a huge showroom of very expensive jade. No one bought a thing. Then we ate lunch at the restaurant attached to the factory, which ended up to be one of the best parts of the tour because we all sat at a large round table and got to know each other a little.
I am not by nature a hugely chatty person with strangers, but I can do “cruise ship director” if necessary. So I decided to try to get to know everyone as this was supposed to be the upside of a tour experience. A few questions later, we at least knew where everyone was from and the group seemed more comfortable. The little girl was shy, but gave us her name: Sophia.
After lunch, I nudged Kinsey over to Sophia and they started up a conversation about Pokemon. Back on the bus, Kinsey and Sophia sat near each other and started to talk and play.
About a half an hour later, we hit some sort of traffic jam and everything came to a standstill. We waited and waited, but there was no movement. The guide and the driver consulted, and finally, the guide said there would be a change of plans. Instead of going to Badaling, we would be going to Juyogguan, another part of the wall which was close by. He passed around a piece of paper that said we understood the change and we were supposed to sign our names. Minutes passed. Cars were still not moving, so the guide told us to get out and we would walk to the wall. Out we went, and began walking amid the other stranded cars, along with a steady trickle of other tour groups who were walking to the wall as well.
Meanwhile, we were at the hottest part of the day. Everyone had been expecting a trip to Badaling, which had a cable car up, and now we were walking to the wall, and walking up the wall.
I was not prepared. We had no water since I’d figured we would be going up in a cable car and would be surrounded by vendors. Some of the others had water left over from lunch. We trotted on.
At the first sign of a vendor, half the group abandoned the guide, dived inside, and promptly grabbed bottles of water. I bought three.
Ten minutes later we were at the entrance.
“You can see,” said the guide, “there are two ways you can go. One is very steep and very hard. One is easier.” The steep side pretty much went straight up the mountain.
The other side was across the river and had more gentle ups and downs.
“You can choose which way you want to go. Who wants to go this way?” He pointed to the steep side. “Who wants to go this way?” He pointed to the easy side.
I was all for the easy side, but every single other person, including Kinsey, wanted to go straight up the hill! We were given two hours and let loose. I couldn’t even find the entranceway to the easy side…and if you looked at the walls, there was virtually no one on the easy side, but 99% of the people were on the hard side. Who on earth were all these crazy people?
We took the hard side. On the one hand, I have to say, it wasn’t as bad as it looked. I had been pretty faithfully working on my elliptical before we left for Asia, precisely for moments like this, and it worked. I climbed and it was hard, but there were no residual effects the next day. Kinsey, meanwhile, had been prepped by girls’ camp and was as nimble as a mountain goat.
On the other hand, it was brutal with the heat. We drank all three bottles of water, plus had an additional soda and celebratory ice cream afterward. Somewhere along the path, one of the Indian men met me, shook his head, and said, “We should have done this at the beginning of the day.” A little while later, the portly man from Florida told me that this was the steepest, most difficult part of the wall near Beijing.
The trail itself, although extremely steep, was developed and in good repair. If you were looking for a wild part of the wall, this would not be it. As I climbed, I developed a rule: never look at the tower in front of you. Concentrate only on the stairs. I think you would do this anyway, as the height of each step bears no resemblance to the step immediately before or after it. Some were as high as my knee (although I am short anyway), and some were only a few inches high. Luckily there is a railing along the side. By concentrating on the steps, I found the climb to go much faster than I expected. I think the speed is due to the fact that the steps are so high, that there are fewer of them than you expect, and so you rise higher more quickly. Or, it may have been a delusional trick, seeing as how I was pretty much overcome by the heat.
Unfortunately, I did not make it to the topmost tower. I gave up at the tower third from the top, not wanting to punish myself so badly that I would not want to go back to another part of the wall later. Looking back, I should have gone on to the top. A rest was badly needed but it wasn’t as physically draining as I thought it would be. Kinsey very nearly made it to the top, only coming down because we did not know how to judge how fast it would take to get down. In the end, only the two Indian men made it to the top. The man from Florida did not quite make it, although to his credit he wanted to, but had to give up due to the time limitation. He was pretty mad about that too.
Back at the bottom, Kinsey and I had ice cream pops, and she shopped for trinkets, buying a Great Wall statue for 5 yuan and no haggling. We caught up with Sophia and her dad who had not been able to make it up very far. Instead, they had made some Chinese seller very happy as Sophia showed us her two large bags of souvenirs.
The minibus was much quieter heading back into Beijing. Kinsey and Sophia played a game called Old Men Guns, some variant of Rock Paper Scissors, and they played and chatted happily, but the rest of the bus was quiet.
Somewhere in Beijing, the tour guide suddenly got on his speaker and announced, “We are here for the tour of the Silk Factory!” There was dead silence on the minibus. The door opened and nobody moved. “Does no one want to go in?” asked the guide. Everyone slowly got up and straggled out.
The short tour of the silk factory was at least interesting. We learned about the life cycle of the silkworm: the eggs, the pupa, the silk cocoon. Finally, the Chinese girl giving the spiel said, “Look in the middle, in the cup. Those little brown things. Does anyone know what they are?” Everyone bent over to look at the small brown things. They looked like small brown peppercorns. No one hazarded a guess. “Yes!” she cried. “Those are the silkworms poo-poo! The silkworms eat only mulberry leaves, so their poo-poo smells only like leaves…like tea! In some places, you can even buy some tea that is made with the poo-poo of the silkworms! And,” she said, “we make a pillow with the silkworms poo-poo. You will see. It is excellent for the health. You smell the tea. It’s very good for you!”
Then she showed us how the factory workers pull the silk cocoons into layers for the quilts. The rest of her spiel concerned pricing and sizes of quilts. Lastly, she showed us the poo-poo pillow, a regular sized pillow with long strips stuffed with the poo-poo on one side. We smelled and touched the pillow. It made a sound like those Amazon rain forest sticks. And it smelled like tea.
Afterwards we were all set free for another 30 minutes. Sophia’s dad bought her a shirt and pants. Kinsey and I wandered around, but things were priced so high, it was hard to buy. The Chinese clerks also made me nervous because they kept following me around asking me what I wanted to try. If I looked at anything for more than a second, they asked me if I wanted to buy it. In the end, we spent a lot of time looking at the fish in the aquarium.
Thirty minutes later we were outside at the minibus. The Indian gentlemen were taking a taxi to the airport and the Japanese girls were also taking a taxi. Down to the last three groups, we got on for a short ride, as our stop was first. I tipped the guide as we got off, and then we both waved madly to Sophia as the minibus pulled away.
Later, back at our hostel, I was cleaning up my bed, when there was a little familiar sound. I looked at my pillow. It sounded like an Amazon rain forest stick, but the smell had faded away. I had been sleeping with a poo-poo pillow all along.
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