In Which We Visit The Great Wall and Have a Bit of Unexpected Excitement

4 June

Thank goodness for Groud. She’s loaned me her adapter into which I’ve plugged my computer and am at last charging my phone. However, I’m sitting in the room because you need the room key to get power to any outlet or other electric implement (lights, tv, etc). I chose to wait while the phone charges rather than locking myself out of the room. (I later learned that anything that closes the circuit will work.) The phone should finish charging before dinner but she’s letting me keep it overnight to charge the camera battery, too.

Today we visited the Great Wall. As I understand the geography, there are eight or ten sections of the wall one can reach from Beijing as a day trip. The section we visited – Muitanyu – is reputedly among the more beautiful and tends to draw fewer visitors than other areas. The day started cool and overcast and I opted for mistaken optimism leaving my recently purchased umbrella at the hotel. When we boarded the bus, the driver had a companion.

I’d been in places before where bus and cab drivers had little religious shrines and the like and would have taken no special notice of this figurine had it not been a porcelain bobble head Buddha that produced a distinctive “tinkety-tink” over every bump in the road.

We needed about two hours to reach the wall and we arrived in steady rain. The street leading up to the entrance is lined with shops of various sorts and I was negotiated the purchase of a lovely lavender poncho for one U.S. dollar. Groud told us we’d have between two and two and a half hours to explore the Wall then we would reconvene at a little pancake shop at 12:00 for lunch. Admission to the Wall was included but that meant taking a 30-to-40-minute climb up one of two paths. For an extra fee we could ride up on an open cable chair lift. I opted for the latter hoping I could beat the rain and because I wanted to spend as much time on the Wall as possible. In fact, only Rose and Erin made the fateful decision to ascend on foot. The view on the ride up was lovely but with the rain, the open car and my death grip on the safety bar, I took no photos. (I found the ride down even more intimidating.)

Yesterday I learned from Kevin that it wasn’t originally conceived as a single construction. Many of the fortifications included in the Wall date from hundreds of years before the Emperor Qin Shi Huang – the first emperor of a unified China – ordered these earlier fortifications be joined into a single system extending for about 5,300 kilometers. The ostensible purpose was to protect China from northern invaders. However, the period before the Qin Dynasty came to power in the third century BCE was known as the Warring States Period and a wall built to keep one group out can also keep another in.

Over the centuries the Wall was neglected, fell into disrepair, and was rebuilt several times. The Wall as we know it today took its greatest shape from the middle of the 14th century to the middle of the 17th century during the Ming Dynasty. The real burst of construction began in the last quarter of the 15th century as Ming rulers sought a largely defensive position. In 1644 the Manchus from central and southern Manchuria broke through the wall and established China’s last dynasty – the Qing – that ruled until 1912. They established their capital in the former Mongol city of Dadu established by Chinggis Khan as a series of connected hutongs and renamed it Beiping. Today it’s Beijing.

When I stepped onto the Wall for the first time, I had this view:

Nice, huh? This gives you an idea that the Wall and views were stunning but the rain, fog and mist will impact the pictures. The eye sees through this better than the camera; I had to wait for breaks in the rain to take my pictures; I wasn’t always ideally located.

Walking this section of the wall is challenging. Not only does one have to cope with the wall following the contour of the terrain (fortunately the elevation is a reasonable 535 meters) but you’re also dealing with steps of wildly differing riser heights.

The rain created an additional complication. I spent much of my time walking with G and the intrepid Kiwis who attacked the walk with a vigor and energy that certainly belied their ages. We ducked under the protective canvas that sheltered visitors waiting for their cable ride down the slope just as the skies opened into a tremendous downpour. I hopped on thinking John and Anne were right behind me but they apparently had a problem with their ticket and I stood at the bottom wondering if they’d disappeared into the same space as the Chinese woman had materialized from on the flight from Frankfurt. Eventually, we all made it – after a fashion. Pictures from the Great Wall are here.

Six of us and Groud arrived at the shop more or less on time. Erin was a no show. We waited. And waited. The time stretched to 12:30 then 13:00 then 13:30 and still we had no sign of her. G had stressed punctuality in our initial group meeting noting particularly that she had no control over train schedules so under those circumstances the group would leave latecomers behind. The seven of us ate lunch and still no sign of Erin. I have to think the pancake stand was a better choice than this option:

After a while, wet and chilled, most of us returned to our van. Groud had security announce Erin’s name and page her to the parking lot over a public address system that the officers assured her could be heard over that entire section of the Wall. We waited and she still failed to appear. G then went back up the Wall on her own to search but she returned having found no trace. As we were about to leave, Groud received a call. Erin was at the hotel in Beijing.

When they’d reached the top of their climb, she and Rose had separated, heading off in different directions. E didn’t have a watch and was relying on her camera to keep track of the time. Apparently, the camera wasn’t accurate and displayed the time as 12:30 when it was only 11:30. She’d rushed to the designated place and when she didn’t see us, assumed we’d left. Somehow she managed a combination of public and private transportation back to Beijing. All the while she’d been trying to call G but sometrhing interfered with cell phone transmission and reception.

With G making certain that the remaining six were on the bus, we made our later than expected departure to return to Beijing. It resulted in a time crunch but we were all relieved that Erin was safe and shared some hearty laughs over the incident. One offshoot of the late departure is that, by the time we completed the return from Muitanyu, we had no time for additional sightseeing because we needed to stock up on food for our first overnight train to Ulaanbataar.

Stock up on food, you wonder? Well, yes. Groud warned us that the train might or might not have a dining car and, that if it did, food choices would likely be limited and expensive. Since we were leaving the hotel at 06:00 Wednesday, we had to finish any shopping Tuesday. I’d bought some noodles from the “pancake lady” but thought some added provisioning was in order.

Six of us plus Groud decided a celebratory meal was in order so we hopped on the Metro to Dongzhimen and made our way to Guijie or as it’s sometimes called by the locals, “Ghost Street.“

How exactly it came by this moniker is disputed. Some maintain that the Chinese character in the name which represents a round mouthed bamboo container for food sounds similar to the word for ghost. Others say it springs from the ghostly spectacle of the grocery and produce night market that was once located here. Nevertheless, it’s an exciting place. G chose  the restaurant called Hua’s Courtyard. A quick search on Trip Advisor has it rated 30th among almost 6,100 Beijing eateries. Our feast included a plate of dumplings, string beans with pork, a kung pao like shrimp dish, something called The Empresses Eggplant, Peking Duck, four 600 ml bottles of beer and three soft drinks.

The total bill was under 600 yuan. That’s less than $12.00 per person. If that’s not enough of a bargain for you, there’s also a show in the middle of dinner that included traditional music, some sleight of hand magic, remarkable balletic moves stretching dough, and a demonstration of tea pouring from a pot with a spout that must have been a meter long combining movements from dance and martial arts. Tomorrow, we’re off to Mongolia.