Beijing to Huangyaguan the culture shock begins!!
The trip to Beijing went fairly quietly apart from me managing to spill an ENTIRE beer over my shorts and that is a very cold experience especially when you happen to be the piggy in the middle, and to get up to sort yourself out you have to move the guy sitting on the right of you who is wetting himself laughing whilst you are going ‘its cold! Its cold! And all wet!’ by the time I managed to unbuckle/scoot out/start frantically patting myself down with the completely inadequate airline blanket (those things are just not designed for mopping up a beery crotch) I not only had wet shorts but wet knickers and a wet seat, which I had to go and sit back down on. A word of warning, those back of seat remote controls are dangerous, they appear to be on a never ending string - they aren’t - it ends, then when you have pulled out miles and miles of the string, it wont go back, you try pushing it back in, but it wont go back in and so you resign yourself to the fact you are going to have an 8 hour flight with the weird remote/telephone and a few miles of string sitting on your lap. As a last ditch effort and in exasperation, you give it one more little tug and zzzzzzzziiiiiiiiiiip it starts shooting back into the back of the chair at a million miles an hour, the remote flies up into the air and knocks your beer over into your lap and I managed to do almost the same thing on the flight from Dubai to Beijing as well, either they are dangerous or I am a dumbarse, (couldn’t possibly be the latter could it?)
So we land in Beijing and the first thing you notice is the smog, I had heard it was bad, but we got in in mid afternoon and it looked like twilight, the next thing you notice about Beijing is the traffic, which causes the smog, eight lane highways criss cross the city, the main ones going from east to west and from north to south and are chocka at any given time of day, as well as the main two roads, loads of other major roads shoot off here there and everywhere there are big spiral bridges connecting the roads just like a sci-fi city, at the side of the roads are thousands and thousands of tower blocks and although nearer to the middle of the city they are glass and chrome creations, most of them are rough arse blocks of flats, it looks a lot like the South Acton estate, which for those of you lucky enough not to know about that estate (it is where the picture of ‘Nelson Mandela House’ was taken, so you get the picture). Beijing is the most populated city in the world, housing 10,839,000 people ‘there are nine million bicycles in Beijing’ - get your facts straight love, its more like twelve!!!
The one thing that most people picked up on as we drove through Beijing for the first time, was that we all felt that somehow it would feel more Chinese, you really could be in any major city in the world, until you start looking at the details, for example the road signs are written in Chinese as well as English and the people look a bit different, but apart from that initially you could be anywhere, and then the bus turns down a backstreet.
The first thing you see is a couple of motorised rickshaws and scruffy little shops and restaurants with people slurping noodles from bowls, plumbers shops with all the pipes and tubes stacked up in a massive pile just inside the door, the hairdressers where Chinese girls with funky spiky hairdo’s are gossiping and staring right back at the busload of gawking white people, it is scruffy but this is the China you expected, we then went around the corner again and into a compound with a uniformed security guard and the four star hotel in which we spent the first night, firmly and safely tucked away from any form of real China.
The dinner that night was o.k. there was some really weird lotus root stuff that was in a sticky, jammy, green sauce, that was so sweet it was inedible, most people were unable to eat the first meal, and went to bed hungry, but I didn’t think it was that bad. It is quite telling about western portion sizes the way that a lot of people came away from the tables saying ‘was that it? Where was the rest of it?’ none of the people I was with was overweight, but it does illustrate one of the reasons that obesity is such a problem in this country, I also found over the course of the time that if you eat with chopsticks out of small bowls and help yourself to as much as you want, you don’t eat nearly as much as when it arrives in front of you on a plate, and you feel obliged to clear your plate, not once, in China did I overeat or come away from the table pogged, although the opportunity was there if I had wanted to take it, I just felt full, off a surprisingly small amount of food each day - and as we all know I like my grub!!! After dinner a couple of us sat and had a few beers and polished off a whole bottle of aftershock before returning to our very nice, warm, soft bedded, clean, beautiful, comfortable, lovely, posh hotel room….. it would soon change.
We were met the following morning after a beautiful breakfast of noodle soup, egg fried rice, green tea and a million and one other things to choose from, by our Chinese guides for the trek Eddie and Jordan who put us onto the busses and we started the drive out of Beijing, I found myself on ‘Eddie bus’ which was great because Eddie talks a lot but he really knows his stuff and is passionate about his city and country, most of my facts and figures in these reports were provided by Eddie (cheers Eddie) as we were still driving through the city Eddie started to fill us in a little about what we were about to face, construction started on The Great Wall of China in the 7th century b.c., its total length is 3800miles long, it starts submerged in the ocean and it ends in the Gobi desert (the Chinese people say that the dragon has its head in the water and its tail in the desert). It has a watch tower or a beacon tower every 400m, on which soldiers used to burn wolf droppings to make signal fires, because apparently, ‘there is nothing that makes a good thick heavy smoke as a great big pile of shit’ (quote from Eddie who then laughed like a drain) The Chinese people do not regard the wall to be finished, it is a work in progress rather like the Golden Gate bridge (once you finish painting it, you have to start all over again) there is always maintenance and upgrades and although now they don’t have to keep the marauding Mongols out, they have hoards of marauding tourists (in parts) instead.
Whilst we were still in the city Eddie had the bus driver stop at the Bank of China for people to change money or use the A.T.M and he also told us if anybody needs to sing a song they can do it here, we sat there thinking why would anybody need to sing a song in the bank, and then Eddie told us that in China, instead of spending a penny or powdering your nose you would say ‘I’m going to sing a song’ or you could ask ‘where can I go to sing a song’ and you would be directed to the nearest toilet, apparently this phrase dates back to the time when the only toilets were the public loos in the middle of town and you would sing a song whilst you were using them to let others know you were there, no walk-ins! (especially if I was singing they would run away screaming)
Soon we left the city and started to get out into the peach growing district which is denoted by a really cool sculpture of a peach (imaginatively titled, the steel peach), the traffic slackened off and the sight of motorbike pick-up trucks and bicycle/tricycle trucks became the norm with cycle tracks along the sides of the roads peach plantations lined the sides of the roads and stretched flat, flat, out for miles. As with the land in the city, the farm land round Beijing is limited as well so people squeeze as many crops into their patch as they could, so if you have a peach plantation you would also grow corn underneath your peach trees, and other crops before the corn comes and after it has finished, in one place people were strip farming in exactly the same way it would have been done in medieval times, along the sides of the road people had piled up some of their produce to sell into little pyramids there was really beautiful corn, peaches, apples, grapes, persimmons and the most beautiful pumpkins, it was at that point when my friend leaned over and said ’look out that side’, the day was really hazy and that is probably why I hadn’t automatically noticed that we had reached the foothills of the mountains.
The mountains in China are nothing like you have ever seen in this country they are almost other worldly, they are staggeringly steep and high and sharp, think of any willow pattern plate or Chinese etching you have ever seen and what you thought was almost a cartoon of a mountain, is actually brilliant artwork, they really rise up from nothing, to razor sharp peaks, there is nothing remotely hilly, or wussy about these, they are MOUNTAINS. Big, hard, mansize, MOUNTAINS, and that is where we were going.
We drove further and further up into the mountains along winding roads that took us up past some of the most amazing autumn scenery, the leaves were russets and golds interspersed with violent red creepers that contrasted wonderfully with the rich dark greens of the alpine trees and the dusty green leaves of the persimmon trees that were heavy with bright orange fruit, persimmons seem to be the most prevalent crop in that area of China and are grown everywhere there is a space, the sharp little valleys were covered in pinpricks of bright orange, with leaves varying from dusty green to almost the same colour as the fruit its self, we began to come across small houses with corn cobs stacked up in the window sills and on the rooftops drying to be ground into maize, people were walking along the side of the roads with huge baskets on their backs full of persimmons and again some people had their crops stacked neatly up on blankets at the side of the road to sell, the few houses turned into a village and it was just past here that we turned into the car park of our first real hotel.
We got off the bus and turned around and that is when we got the first view of the wall its self, high up in the mountains, right on the ridgeline, we could trace it down the mountain and up the side of the next one, a thin white line on the mountainside.
We had our lunch in the hotel restaurant that day and it is then we got our first real taste of a Chinese restaurant, I don’t think this restaurant was used to 50 English tourists at once as it took an age to bring anything out, and as we would find out the staple (rice) is always the last thing to be brought which is fine but seeing as how you are surposed to pile your meat/veggies on top of your rice this invariably means that if you wait for the rice, the other stuff will be cold by the time it gets there so ‘dig in mate!’ slowly, slowly, they brought various different veggie dishes out, to the point we thought that they thought we were ALL vegetarians (they had been told to make sure they catered for veggies) but after a while, out came the most wonderful chicken and beef creations in chilli sauces and garlic sauces, enough to satisfy even me (the more chilli and garlic in something the better I like it!) there was the one dish though which looked great, smelled great but when you put it in your mouth Kit-E-Kat came to mind - I would never normally spit something out in a restaurant, but into the napkin it went!!!! Along with everyone else’s who had tried it - on every table was piles and piles of steaming cat food left untouched, after lunch we had a short time to look around the garden at the concrete fish pond with the lazy carp which seemed to be asleep in the bottom, have a quick ciggie (me and my partner in crime Penny) and use the loo, which was the first encounter with a Chinese public (almost) toilet, as you walk in the smell hits you - you don’t want to hang around in a Chinese loo, and it is the last place you would want to stand for a girly chat at any time of the day! The toilets are squat toilets and there is no paper, it is completely a B.Y.O. job, what also contributes to the smell is that Chinese plumbing is not set up for paper, so there is a charmingly fragrant waste paper basket next to the squat, toilet doors invariably don’t lock or at least they did, once upon a time but they haven’t been fixed yet and probably wont be any time soon, it is best just to sing a song and hope the door doesn’t swing open exposing a bare arse to the world!!!
By the time I came out of the loo I was in time to witness all three of the Chinese chefs from the restaurant all sitting outside on the kitchen wall chain smoking and hocking loogies as if it was going out of fashion, the hocking hacking sound is disgusting and very, very Chinese, I had been warned about it before I came out as you all know, but hearing about something and hearing it for real are two different things, and nobody is ashamed or bothered by it in the least, men do it, and more worryingly women and children, at one point I saw a very well dressed Chinese lady about the same age as my mum who started doing it as she walked down a street and didn’t seem to think anything of it - eeeeeeyyyyyyyeeeeeww!
After lunch back on the bus we piled and up into the mountains once again we drove, before long we, stopped at a car park and all get out to tackle the first section of the wall, before we started the English tour leader David lead some warm up excersizes, and we were introduced to Mr Lu who would be filming our trek for prosterity (and yes I have a 3 hour dvd if anyone wants to be bored) Mr Lu all along the trek seemed to film me a lot - I thought he fancied me until I saw the dvd and realised I was the comic lead (I looked bloody awful, red faced, fat and sweaty - dead sexy!)
After the warm up we headed for the wall, to get to it we had to climb some really hard, high stairs, it was at this point I realised that my 12 mile strolls down the themes tow path and 10 mile rambles through Bushey and Richmond parks might not have been enough - especially as for at least the month and a half preceeding the trip my training had consisted mostly of lying in my bed thinking ‘I really should go out walking - never mind’. I had got it into my head that 10 hours of walking up and down a bar every day would help me - after all it is a long bar! To be fair NOTHING I could have done would have been enough to tackle the wall, unless I had actually been able to walk something similar every day for most of my life, nothing prepares you for the enormity and grandure that is The Great Wall of China.
Once on the wall you can see it snaking off in front of you as far as the eye can see, the highs are very high and there doesn’t seem to be any lows (that is because there isn’t any) To begin with I made a fairly good pace, I was with the leaders of the pack but soon enough I was back in the middle which I felt comfortable with, the stairs on this section were endless both up and down. The stairs are all of varying heights ranging from 1 housebrick on its side to 2 and then the killers, which on this section, were 2 on their side and one upright, it took me a little longer on these ones but it was nice to stop every so often and take in the view and the wall at this point had little windows at knee level every so often which gave a nice breeze up your shorts!!!
The view from up there is like nothing you could ever imagine, the mountains are really jagged and when you look out there is just layer after layer of them going as far as you can see they reminded me very strongly of the misty mountains as described in Tolkein’s the Hobbit or the mountains in the Lord of the Rings, they don’t seem real, but yet they are and I was walking on them. before long I reached the welcome coolness of my first watchtower, the floors are dusty, but the light shines in and casts pools of warm light onto the floor, you can see for miles from each window, I would hate to be the enemy that tried to outsmart this system, you can see everything, the slightest movement, the air is so still you can hear the slightest noise, and at the slightest movement or noise they would have been up the stairs and onto the roof like a rat up a drainpipe lighting those smelly-arse fires to let the others know there was someone coming, it is no wonder it was impregnable for so long. The weather that day was warm and welcoming, like slipping into a warm bath after a hard days’ work, but the weather becomes bitterly cold in the winter with heavy snows, and roasting hot in the summer, with heat up to 60 degrees (thanks Eddie for that one) it is only in the spring and autumn when the weather is pleasant enough to do a trek, so all I can think is these soldiers who built the wall and were garrisoned along it were HARD, HARD, BASTARDS.
Up and up we climbed, but what goes up, must come down, and soon we found that down is just as hard as up. Even the people who had trained really hard, found their legs turning into jelly and the compulsion to fall (weirdly) became very strong, before long we got to a part where we left the main wall and walked through the woods down a very steep track, back to the road and the back of the hotel - we had only walked for three hours and strangely it didn’t seem enough, the wall however, carried on in front of us and went very, very sharply up into the mountains above us for what seemed like an eternity, but we had finished for the day and anyway we weren’t going to be walking that stretch were we?
So back we went to the hotel which had been built in the design of a Chinese maze/soldiers garrison (weird combination but it worked) and were given out room keys. The rooms were all built around a central courtyard and were basic but clean and nice (although they were all joined together, I likened them to wendy houses, and they had western toilets and bog roll, which I promptly stole, result!!!)
We showered and freshened up an then a little lady came around to sell bottles of beer - litre bottles of cold, crisp, fresh, beautiful tasting Chinese beer which cost the equivalent of 70p ($1.40 if you are stateside - don’t you just love the strong pound!) and we all sat around the courtyard for a while swigging beer out of the bottle and chilling out - life doesn’t get much better than that.
That evening we were informed that we would be going out to one of the locals houses for dinner - I will assume this guy was of some importance locally because his house was huge, so headlights on heads (it was pitch black with no streetlights) we walked the couple of hundred yards down the road to dinner, and then we witnessed the true horribleness of the Chinese dinner (sorry host, but it was dreadful) (and sorry to say, George it was bloody awful) Now having 50 people show up at your house for dinner and all want to eat, is no mean feat, and they did admirably well for that, we were put in the conservatory on plastic tables and chairs, and most of the food was already laid out on the tables and stone cold (im not sure if it was surposed to be or not) by the time we arrived there were several plates of veggies in some kind of cold garlic sauce, I recognised pak choy and green beans but not a lot else, there was a plate of something that resembled large brown elastic bands and tasted exactly like large brown elastic bands and the crowning glory was a plate of wobbly pink SPAM - you will hear more about spam, (that is what Chinese people think English people eat for every meal!) they did bring some meat dishes out (again Kit-e-Kat) and some chicken, and then they brought out a dish of pak choy with what appeared to be tiny strong smelling little fishy penises in a whitish translucent sauce dumped all over it, I tried it and the fishy bits were preserved shrimp, but it smelled so badly, again it was a discreet napkin job, the people at that house probably think English people are extremely rude (probably) or have very small appetites because most of the meal went untouched, they must think however that we are bigtime alkies, because we swilled a mountain of beer (which they must have made a tidy profit on) after dinner our host made a huge bonfire in the garden/carpark of his house and we all sat round drinking beer and generally having a whale of a time, all in all, apart from the food, really fabulous night.
I cant leave this subject until I have tackled the toilets. If I were to have a dinner party at my house, you would be able to eat your dinner off the bathroom floor, not so the Chinese house (or rather this Chinese house - I wont tar them all with the same brush) I was the first to go to the loo when we got there (the result of about 3 big Chinese beers before we left the hotel) and was horrified to find that a) it was a squat (half expected that anyway) but b) the floor was swimming in urine, to the point that I had to come out and roll up my trousers to above the knee, so that when I pulled them down to go, the rolled up bit wouldn’t go in, it stunk in there and not only that but the bathroom also housed the washing machine and dirty washing was festooned all around, apart from the toilet being wet and smelly it was also filthy, I’m sorry but even the poorest person in the world can have a clean toilet, but Chinese people seem to have different priority’s. My room- mate Deirdre, later in the trip said ’Chinese people are mingers’ and I’m afraid to say at this point, she was right. But they are very hospitable, and we did have a good evening, and slowly, slowly we made our way back to the hotel to sleep.
It was when we got back to the hotel that I decided to donate my entire pack of cold and flu tablets to one of the tour leaders who had got man flu, because after all, I had gotten over my flu 2 weeks ago and ’I wont need them’. FAMOUS LAST WORDS……………………………….......
