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First, an update related to my last post: Sinostand, a China blog with which I've been in love for about a year now, has also done a piece on military training in Chinese universities, with footage of the same stuff I've been watching during my kung fu classes: http://sinostand.com/2013/09/22/video-behind-chinas-college-military-training/ Naturally, it's far better written and more interesting than I could manage, so everyone should go and read that. I'll wait.
So, a lot's been happening since my last post. Somehow I've ended up earning 400 yuan a week for one two-hour session reading English books with a 9-year-old girl, the daughter of one of my teachers in fact, which can pretty easily cover my day to day living expenses, and involves next to no commute. So naturally I'm looking for more tutoring work, because I have no classes on Friday and if I can bring that figure up to 800 or even 1200 a week I might be able to have a cheeky week of travelling without transferring cash from home, or even start saving some money for year 4. I can't imagine there are many people who move to China and send money home to the UK, so that'll be something.
What else? Oh, I have a big stick now, which is actually quite exciting. After a kung fu class, our instructor took us to a shop he knows that was completely packed with cool-looking martial arts stuff. For now he's just teaching us to use the staff, which is slightly longer than we are tall (cut to size), but with any luck we'll be moving onto swords/spears/chains sometime over this year. Since we came with our instructor, whom the people in the shop knew, we each got a staff and a pair of kung fu shoes for a total of 45 yuan (less than a fiver), significantly less than it would have been if we'd just wandered in from the street, so I'm looking forward to buying more cool stuff for ridiculously low prices in the future. And of course, in China you barely get a second glance when cycling through rush-hour traffic with a six-foot wooden pole over your shoulder. It should be even funnier once we have swords. Admittedly I don't think they're sharp (at least not when you buy them) but it's amazing how what in Britain would probably at least get you shouted at by a self-important traffic warden is the most natural thing in the world in China.
Anyway, the pollution today's pretty horrific, leaving me trapped in my flat, venturing out only very occasionally to buy biscuits (the 1st of October is China's National Day, the anniversary of when the PRC was declared, and the whole week is a national public holiday, so the pollution's sky-high on the weekends either side with all the cars and trains), so this is probably the perfect time to finally write about my trip to the Great Wall last weekend.
Weirdly, last weekend was the Mid-Autumn Festival, so although not an official holiday there were loads of people going on short trips away from the city. A hastily-concocted plan to visit a wild (unrestored) section of the Great Wall led to most of our flat joining them. We set off at a reasonable hour on Friday, the first clear day that week. It was fantastic to be able to see blue sky and mountains in the distance, rather than a fade to grey after a few blocks. Because we were going to the Jiankou section of wall, which hasn't been restored, transport required a little more consideration, and we ended up booking an unlicenced taxi (a fairly common practice in Beijing) to get us all the way out there. The driver was an absolute piece of work, complaining about everything in an accent so thick that all I could make out was the swear words, of which there were MANY. Let's just say that quite a few Chinese people's mothers' ears must have been burning. Admittedly there was one point at which I wanted to join the chorus: after an hour-long traffic jam which we'd just chalked up to the fact it was the Mid-Autumn Festival, we saw that the real reason was that roadworks were happening on a little bridge which just happened to be the only way to get anywhere for miles, taking it down to one lane. Utterly inconvenient roadworks on one of the busiest days of the year - it reminded me slightly of home.
We arrived at a fish farm/restaurant at the bottom of the mountains in which the wall section we were looking for was nestled. It was actually quite a tourist draw in itself - you could catch fish from their pond and then have them cooked and brought to your table. What we hadn't expected, but should have, was how expensive said fish were. Fortunately, Frank had recently got a new credit card, and was desperate to buy things on it so he could get reward points, so we swallowed the fact that we'd have to pay him back at some point and just enjoyed the fish, which was actually really nice. After a quick trip to the sort of public toilet you were grateful to have to squat in rather than sit on, we set off, and after some discussion as to the way up (since the wall's not restored, tourists technically aren't allowed up there, so the only trail markings were water bottles and bits of cloth tied to branches, and the odd official sign saying we weren't allowed up there and that the area was prone to rockfalls), we started to climb.
Reassuringly there were quite a few groups of hikers and families, both Chinese and foreign, also headed for that section of the wall. It was nice to see 'proper' tourists who were there on their own rather than following a tour guide with a silly flag and a script to get through. According to Frank, who works as a tour guide, there's no way any tour company would take the risk of organising an excursion to a section of the wall that's formally closed, so unlike other tourist sites I've been to in China, seeing other people was actually a nice, occasional surprise with "hello"s and "not far now"s exchanged, albeit in Chinese. Anyway, after what seemed like an endless climb, Piero and I reached the top of an incredibly rickety ladder to see the wall right in front of us, then looked back and realised the others were nowhere to be seen. After a short wait, the rest of the group joined us, and the diminutive peasant type living in a makeshift shelter by the top of the ladder started getting shirty at us. He wanted us to pay 5 yuan each for the privilege of using 'his' ladder. Never mind that the ladder had been placed on top of the only part of that section of the trail that would have been climbable, and in such disrepair that it was actually probably more hazardous than the trail itself, he felt he'd been cheated. Or at least he acted like he did. Opinions in our group ranged from reluctantly willing to pay to utterly opposed to the concept (guess which side I took), and eventually Glen paid him the equivalent of 2 kuai each to get him to shut up and get out of our way. With that little kerfuffle dealt with, we were on the wall.
Frank had spent much of the journey up talking about how Mutianyu (the section where I'd been before, which becomes the Jiankou section once you leave the restored bit) and Badaling were like Disneyland versions of the Great Wall, and after 20 minutes of walking on an unrestored section it was obvious why. Seeing the wall as it had been left, probably unrestored for hundreds of years, was absolutely incredible. The fact that the scenery was every bit as impressive as at Mutianyu didn't hurt. We didn't even mind that the occasional peddler wanted 10 yuan for a bottle of water - to be fair to them, bringing drinks up that hill is not a job we'd have done unless the rewards were worth it. The day consisted of wending our way through the overgrowth (is that a word? It should be) on relatively level sections and bumping in to the odd near-vertical cliff that used to be a steep flight of steps before centuries of wind, rain and ice took their toll. As it turned out, the climbs were actually pretty easy, with nice big chunky holds and only a few loose stones that looked secure but would have sent us falling to our deaths or crushed someone's head if any weight had been put on them. The weather also decided to be friendly; the sun had been blazing down all morning, but as soon as we got a little way up the mountain, light clouds appeared and made the trek much more comfortable.
After a solid day's hiking whose story is better told by the photo album I've uploaded, we arrived at Zhengbei Tower, a fairly popular spot with campers since it's still in pretty good nick and one of the highest points around. From our side, the entrance was about 3 metres above the wall in its present condition, and the only way up seemed to be via yet another dodgy-looking ladder with yet another old peasant charging for its use. This guy, however, was willing to move his ladder aside and let us climb up on our own, which was rather accommodating of him, and since he was also selling drinks a few of us restocked our provisions before he headed down. Fortunately we were the first group to arrive that was planning on camping there, so half of us set up the tents in the best spot and the other half went out to get firewood until it got too dark to rummage around for sticks on a 1:1 gradient. People gradually began to arrive in dribs and drabs, most clutching a few branches they'd found in the last few hundred metres to add to our quite frankly magnificent pile, and just as it was getting dark we lit the newspaper we'd brought up and set the fire going in a firepit that had fortuitously been left there by hikers past. Having wisely decided against Danny's suggestion to bring a fish and some charcoal up the wall with us from the village below, we subsisted on granola bars and spent the night drinking what booze we'd brought up or decided to buy from the guy with the ladder when he mysteriously reappeared at around 10pm with a bag full of beers like a grubby Santa Claus who charges for presents.
Annoyingly, since one of the big cultural aspects of the Mid-Autumn Festival is looking up at the moon and thinking how the people you miss back at home, despite being so far away, are all looking at the same moon (Chinese officials were generally given posts outside their home province because it would supposedly limit the risks of corruption), the clouds that had stopped us from sweating away half of our body weight during the day didn't clear in the night, so although we saw a hazy white circle in the sky at one point that was probably the moon, we weren't able to see any stars on the one night we got away from the light pollution of Beijing. You can't have everything I suppose, and at least the night stayed reasonably warm after the fire had died away.
We woke up on the Saturday just as the sun was rising, but I could see from the vantage point of my sleeping bag that there was still thick cloud, so grabbed an extra half hour of sleep while the others got dressed. When I finally got up and emerged on the roof I was surprised to see a sizeable group of Chinese men who hadn't been there the night before, who'd apparently brought fairly expensive camera equipment up the side of a mountain at night in order to photograph a sunrise that ended up being ruined by clouds. They didn't seem too upset though, and that combined with the fact that they were all about the same age led me to suspect ulterior motives at work. Maybe Great Wall photography's the Chinese equivalent of going fishing when the in-laws visit. Who knows?
Anyway, we broke camp just after 6, and by 7 had reached the highest tower for miles around, which we decided was as good a place as any to stop for a hearty breakfast of oreos and a curiously-named isotonic drink ('Pocari Sweat'). Then it was just one more precipitous descent and an hour or so of more overgrown, half-collapsed but mercifully level sections, and we were on top of the restored section of Mutianyu. It was really bizarre, after having seen so much of the wall in ruins, to suddenly be walking on (some approximation of) the wall as it must have looked in its heyday. As we came over the crest that led to the beginning of the restored section, we were faced by a vista of indescribable beauty. The sun had risen in the sky and the clouds had dispersed, but it was still early and the valleys around us were only just warming up. It was a perfectly clear day, and in every direction we could see peak after peak emerging from a sea of mist, getting fainter and fainter as they got further away, in a way that's inspired Chinese landscape paintings for centuries.
Then we went down into the Mutianyu section and were confronted by the horrible reality of tourism in China. Huge groups of nouveaux riches swarmed around us, bedecked in knockoff Western designer brands and clutching smartphones with garish cartoon-character covers. Then, the 60 yuan we each spent on getting the toboggan down from the wall might as well have been thrown away as we ended up behind some moronic women who from their conversation were Emirates cabin crew, who went down the thing at a snail's pace, filming it on their phones. Admittedly, alarm bells should have rung when I heard one of them, whom I'm ashamed to say was British, telling her friends that they should all go on the toboggan "because Beyoncé did in her documentary [yep, that was the word she used] and she was all like 'Wooooooooooooooooooo[etc. ad nauseam]!'" I'm grinding my teeth just thinking about it, a week later. Once we'd actually made it down, we than had to push past endless stalls selling tourist tack and Western franchises, and negotiate our way home via two separate taxis. Needless to say I spent the rest of the day utterly infuriated with the world and the people who live in it, but looking back now the ending doesn't spoil what was genuinely an incredible experience.
I'm on holiday for all of next week as well (long live the Communist Party!) but not planning to go anywhere. I feel like I've only just got settled in Beijing, so I'm going to take this week to chill out, maybe get ahead with work and find some more people willing to pay me money to teach their children English. If I ever do get wanderlust, hopefully I'll have enough saved up that I can just take a cheeky week off without dipping into my account (it should only take a week or two to have that kind of money saved up). Although my mark this year depends on attendance, it doesn't have any impact on my Cambridge degree, and I'm pretty sure it's actually possible to fail this year without it preventing me from doing year 4 at Cambridge, since I've heard of plenty of people who just gave up on classes from the second term and who still got to carry on. So I'll not be taking the official side of things too seriously this year. On a lighter note, I caved recently and ate my first Western meal (lasagna), but I don't care because a) it was homemade and b) it was AMAZING. I hadn't realised how much I was missing cheese, but one bite of that and I was in heaven. I ate 4 portions and slept solidly for ten hours, straight through my alarm. Utter bliss.
- comments
Rosie Happy to hear you are thinking of sending money home to your poor parents :)
Iain Sounds great fun, and the pics look wonderful, (also, lovin the series of funnies and odd foods) nice one. Hope the pollution doesn't spoil your week off. Take care.