Our final destination in China--Beijing--was a 12 hour train ride away. Not the longest train ride I'd been on, not by a long shot, but still a substantial amount of time to be confined to a single bunk. During this trip, I observed a man who had brought nothing--not a single thing--to do during the ride. I will never understand these people who don't bring anything to occupy themselves with on a long train trip. They only sit, stare at others, look out the window, and maybe fiddle with their cell phones. Are these people crazy? Masochistic? Stupid? Myself, I come equipped with an mp3 player, four books, and a Nintendo DS. Minimum. As long as the mode of transportation is comfortable, I'm ready for the long haul.
After fucking around at the hotel, (they only had one functional computer, which we waited to use for a solid hour while a chain-smoking Chinese man chatted away on ICQ. [Remember ICQ?] Finally, by switching out the keyboard and mouse of another computer were we able to get online. They then charged us 2 yuan for making a local telephone call), we made it out to a well-known art district, and took in a wide variety of works as night fell, exposing a wounded moon.
For over an hour, we walked in an enormous circle, searching for a famous food street, finding it finally, not 30 meters from where we'd started. There, we found a long line of stalls hung with paper lanterns, each serving up something different. None of it was very good, but with stalls selling locusts, cockroaches, bee larvae, beetles, chicken hearts, snake on a stick, scorpions (available in two sizes!), and centipedes, it was at least interesting. It was also funny. One fat, mustachioed Mediterranean man with a gruff voice bellowed, "Sheep balls!", at people, while, two stalls down, a Chinese vendor asked, "Do you like penis?" to passing tourists.
The following day, under a red sun cut cleanly into the sky, we set out for The Great Wall. Months earlier, I'd booked it as a private tour, a tour I now realized was outrageously expensive for China, but I wasn't going to let that spoil an experience I'd, in some ways, been looking forward to since elementary school. Our guide introduced himself as Chenney, and, after a couple of hours of driving, we had a hundreds-year-old section of the Wall entirely to ourselves.
We hiked along the Wall for 3 hours, some parts recently restored, and others crumbling with age, all the while moving through mountains shrouded in a heavy fog. Occasionally, we'd catch glimpses of lone houses in the valleys, people who'd shunned the nearby megalopolis of Beijing, and decided to somehow scrape it out in isolation. We passed through over a dozen watchtowers our first day, structures of heavy stone rising 2 or 3 stories which served as barracks and storehouses for the countless soldiers that manned the Wall continually; the oldest one, Chenney told us, was built over 6 centuries ago. 600 years. My mind reeled at the number. The tower was standing a hundred years before Europeans discovered Canada, (Vikings not included). The entire continent of North America remained unspoiled for a whole lifetime after the first stones of this structure were laid.
At one point, we had to leave the wall entirely, and follow a trail for some time in order to avoid a military base. I asked Chenny what sort of military base it was, but he only replied, "I don't know. It's secret." "It's what?" I asked, not hearing him. "Secret." Then I wondered, in a country as huge as China, why the military had chosen to set up a base right next to The Great Wall--probably the most popular tourist attraction there was--so close that they had to fence-off a portion of it and force people to walk around. I could only conclude that it must be some expression of communist power; the Chinese military is so badass, it can even close down the Great Wall.
Though the fog limited our view to a few hundred meters, Chenney assured us that, on a clear day, the view was spectacular. Afterwards, we checked into an isolated hotel in a deserted resort town. It was the low season, and we were the only guests. There were no stars that night, only a faint smudge of moon.
No comments:
Post a Comment