Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
The second full day of our travels took us to the Great Wall of China. Apparently in China there is an old saying which says you are not a true man until you've done the Great Wall.
Well, I am now a true (wo)man. As are my fellow travellers, who I will introduce in this blog entry.
The Great Wall. It was difficult. It was exhausting. It was breathtaking. But most of all it was rewarding.
But you've all seen a thousand photos of the Great Wall and I'm sure you can pretty well imagine what it was like.
What you won't be able to imagine from the pictures is what Dragon called the 'local friends'.
The local friends are people who live nearby whose main source of income is selling souvenirs to tourists.
As the spot we went to was a relatively non-tourist location and it's still pretty much winter there aren't many potential customers. Therefore the local friends will do everything they can to ensure every potential customer buys something.
So they follow you, asking you to buy something all the way up and down the wall. And it doesn't matter how many times you say no they will keep following,
Some people find it really annoying.
Mel and David, a couple from Sydney, said they got to the point where they simply could not put up with it anymore. Eventually they told the women following them that they would buy something when they came back.
Greg and Joy, a couple from Adelaide, and their daughter Sherry, didn't mind them too much. They raced on ahead of everyone and got their local friends to take scenic photos of the three of them together.
Regina, a very nice but also pragmatic young person from Switzerland, also didn't seem to mind them too much.
Lauren, an Essex girl, just took it all in her stride as she seems to do just about everything. She didn't chat continually to them but wasn't averse to getting them to take photos, etc.
I personally loved the local friends. Well at least the one assigned to us.
We chatted. I got 'Jo' (as I will call him for lack of the correct spelling of his name) to teach me some Chinese words. I wasn't very good but we had quite a while. He helped the three of us take photos and showed us some of the better places to take a photo.
At one point we sat down for a drink we bought from a little old lady at one of the towers. We tried to bargain with her but she absolutely wouldn't take anything less than 10 yuan because she'd had to carry everything up all this way.
And she wasn't young. Neither was Jo. He told me he was 67 which I believed but we did also joke about the fact he almost definitely had bionic legs.
Here we were, three young, fit women, huffing and puffing and stopping every few minutes for a breather and 67 year old Jo was sprightly walking up and down all the steep steps and slopes as if he did it everyday- which he did of course.
We had been warned by Dragon about these local friends before we arrived at the Great Wall. He told us not to feel obliged to buy something from them if we don't want to.
But gratitude is one of the strongest marketing ploys.
Eventually even Regina bought some postcards from them. Lauren haggled herself some very reasonably priced fans for her family.
Greg, Joy and Sherry haggled a bit less ruthlessly and acquired some very nice chopsticks for 65 yuan.
I tried my hand at haggling and failed miserably. It went something like this
Jo- do you like this shirt? I give it to you for 100 yuan
Me- Too much. 50 yuan
Jo- 90 yuan
Me- (calculates that's about AU$15) Ok, 90 yuan. Done.
But Mel and David, perhaps the most grateful for being left alone in peace, bought the same set of chopsticks as Greg, Joy and Sherry for a rather generous 100 yuan.
The local friend who sold it to them apparently actually felt guilty about ripping them off so much so she gave them a set of post cards as well.
The Great Wall was beautiful and from up there you could see a lot of the countryside. You can also see a lot about the people you are with.
P.S. the photo is not actually the Great Wall because I only took photos on my camera and at the moment I have no way of uploading it from my camera to the blog. Will try to edit it later. The photo is actually from the Summer Palace the next day
- comments