The Great Wall, Simatai to Jinshanleng

Sleeping in marvelously powerful air-conditioning was lovely and cool but it meant that I woke up on my second-to-last day in Beijing with a sore throat. I figured that the day would be long and arduous, what with our plan to head to the Great Wall, so I went down to the hostel's restaurant and ordered myself a big breakfast with beans on toast and hot tea. I listened to Daft Punk playing in the restaurant and double-checked the very sketchy directions that I had gleaned from the guidebook and online.

See, not all stretches of the Great Wall are created equal. The closest section to Beijing is a huge tourist destination and I'd been warned away from it. "You go there and take a picture and leave" wasn't what I wanted from this immense human construct. So I read up on the longer hikes which can be done and found the coolest sounding one, between Jinshanling and Simatai. This one got extra points for being 10 kilometers (an easy hike, we figured) and having a rope bridge at the end of it. All the same, choosing that stretch of wall had its downside, the directions I could find for getting to Jinshanling were sparse and vague. Getting from Beijing to Miyun didn't seem bad, but once in Miyun we had to catch another bus whose number I couldn't find, or hire a taxi or minibus a prospect which was made more complicated by the fact that be no longer had our Mandarin-capable Bryan in tow. I was fretful over all the planning aspects for the first part of the morning, but by the time we got to Miyun I had calmed down considerably. I should always remember that it works out in the end.

In Miyun we ran into a minibus driver who was selling his services to Jinshanling and even though he spoke no English and we no Mandarin we were able to haggle the price of transportation down from 180 RMB (about $30) to 75 RMB ($4 perm not bad) to the start point. He would also meet us at the end of the hike, in Simatai to bring us back to Miyun to catch the bus. He ended up being a great driver, totally crazy and a firm believer in passing everything on the road that he could, even when the road had dropped to one active lane up a mountain and around a corner. Even though China's roadways were sometimes extremely chaotic Max put it in perspective for me. When he traveled in Thailand last year he ended the trip not knowing which side of the street they were supposed to drive on, legally. At least in China most people drove on the right side of the road most of the time.

To start our hike we headed up a steep track set into a hillside, feeling like Indiana Jones.

I feel rather grand about that day, but there isn't a whole lot I can say about it. We were alone for most of the hike, except for a few run-ins with other hikers and the numerous intrepid salesman who sat in the shade selling much desired ice water. The wall felt very remote, since it was set in among wooded hillsides and we could only spy the occasional valley farmstead. I heard a rooster crow once, which seemed fitting and appropriate (certainly moreso than hearing a peacock in the Nevada desert.)

Parts of the wall on the Jinshanling section are in great disrepair so instead of walking on the top layer of smooth flagstones, or even the second layer of more haphazard laid stones you're walking on crumbling rock dust and the rammed earth core of the wall which is orange, like the surrounding hillsides.

Words like grand, vista, awe-inspiring floated around in my head after we got back from the hike, but they didn't really connect to anything in a coherent way so all I can say about the day was that it was amazing. See, my proof of amazing:

















As you can tell from the pictures, some stretches of wall were difficult to walk on, and some were just extremely sheer, so by the time we reached our goal we were all sweaty, hungry and thoroughly exhausted. We were also fantastically pleased with ourselves. On the bus from Miyun to Beijing Brennan read me two Just So Stories, one about the Alphabet and one about the Armadillo and then I was asleep, in a blissful doze.

Airports, Trains and Returning to Beijing

I had my picture taken three times in the Guangzhou airport. I guess I was having a really celebrity kind of day. The first guy who took my picture was very surreptitious about it as I was standing in line to check in for my flight back to Tianjin, I caught him in the act though. The second and third pictures were taken when two tiny Chinese girls waved me over and thumbs-upped me and made the universal camera motion, miming taking a picture. I grinned at the camera and flashed a peace sign, sure, I can dig it. (C'mon, it's not like I was wearing sunglasses and swank clothes, I had on my scratched glasses and a red bandanna because I was having a bad hair day, what gives with all the attention?)

We made it to Tianjin, and left Bryan in the waiting arms of his family before Max, Brennan and I boarded the second fastest train in China, which travels from Tianjin to Beijing (a distance of about 80 miles) in a half hour. We got on the train, chatted a bit and then we were at our station already. It was a bit anticlimactic, really.

Finding out hostel was a bit of a problem, since we had to figure out how to get from the shiny new train station to the subway. We found a very sweet boy manning an information desk who apologized profusely at his terrible English (it wasn't, really) and directed us to the right train. Thank you, Chinese public transportation, you never let us down! The bus dropped us off at the metro and I was startled to discover that since my last overwhelmed experience with the Beijing subway I had learned some traveling skills. Picking out the station names and reading station maps was as simple as reading the map for the BART or the El-trains in Chicago. I guess before I was too shocked that I was actually in China really and truly to properly function, before. After almost two weeks, Beijing was still huge but no longer incomprehensible and threatening.

Wufangjin hostel is near a big shopping street that is in turn very close to Tienanmen square. Wufanjin street is gew-gaw paradise, fans and chopsticks and beetles encased in plastic and tea sets and electronics and keychains and snowglobes, etc. The main street is lined with little alleys (Beijing hutong, I missed you!) that are devoted to more plastic souvenirs than you can sneeze at, and all of the animals of the world offered to you fried on a stick.

The polyglot hawkers at some of the food booths would call out to us in English, waving their hands over mysterious food items. The starfish, seahorses and tentacled octopi on a stick were recognizable, but there was all manner of other seafood items that were mysterious. "Snake!" one hawker cried, brandishing a stick covered in wiggly, chopped pieces of snake. "Dog!" he offered another meat on a stick with his other hand. Max was very excited, since eating dog was one of his remaining goals and he only had two days left to realize it. So we bought dog on a stick, which the man proceeded to deep fry for us. Brennan refused to eat something that he had helped name, in the past so no dog (or duck) for him, but Max and I shared bites of fried dog. "Alsatian!" Max crowed, but it really just tasted like crunchy breaded fried meat. The creepiest thing on a stick was definitely the still-moving scorpions, twitching their little tails at me.



In more appetizing food on a stick news, I had one of these. Fruit on a stick that had been dipped into some sort of hot sugar that dried and looked like golden glass. I got one of the mixed fruit sticks, the plum and pineapple were especially delicious. The only part that was disappointing was that little red blob on the end of the stick, which is a cousin to the crabapple called a "haw" because that sucker was gritty and bitter.

Back at the hostel I totally won my very first ever game of pool against Brennan (even though really both of us lost since I got the 8-ball in during the middle of the game but Brennan let me have a re-do.) Considering how much I suck at pool this very much bragging rights for me.

The hostel didn't have any more room in their bunk rooms so they bumped us up to the next best thing, a three person private room. At night Max is a sleep-talker, and my favorite moment was in the dark middle of the night when I woke up long enough to hear him talking and cry out, "Scones!" with concerned urgency. It was probably one of those dreams where what you say outloud isn't what you mean in the dream. Then again, he is British so scones might be an urgent matter after all.

Chimelong Paradise Waterpark and the Pearl River

The theme of our third day in Guangzhou was Water. I'd spent the first two days in the city dripping from the humidity so why not splash around in a pool for a while. Danching and Bryan and Max had all gone off to visit with Danching's family. (Max got to eat a Chinese delicacy which came in four different courses, each of the four different stomachs of a cow. And a bit of what was probably spinal cord. I really missed out.) The waterpark was very Westernized, it played all American music and was actually the only place to do so in China. It worked exactly the same as any waterpark in the U.S., so I rented a locker and stowed away my shoes and clothes and glasses and walked around like a blind person all day. By the time I was actually waiting in line for a ride it had started raining, which was fine since I was in my bathing suit and planning on getting wet anyway.

At the center of a wave pool there was a big dais and a stage where an emcee excitedly announced contestants for what appears to be another Americanization, a beauty pageant or at least a swimsuit competition. I didn't watch that for long, since I'm always boggled enough by those, let alone when they're in Cantonese. After soaking all day and smelling suspiciously unlike chlorine (they purify with O3, instead, according to Brennan) I slogged back to the hostel and got ready for our second water float of the day.

Brennan and I grabbed a river cruise down the Pearl River. The dock was conveniently right in front of our hostel and I wanted a bunch of pictures of the city neon, so I very cleverly forgot my camera. So the following pictures come from Brennan's very splendid camera.



This was the street our hostel was on, you can see the big alluring sign to lure in the drinkers for Bai Etan Bar Street.





Some buildings completely changed color as I watched them.





Bridges were lit with many colors.







And buildings that during the day were covered with a thin covering of coal dust and grime became brilliant.








While the skyscrapers lining the river were brilliant, they didn't hold a candle to the gaudiness of some of the other ships cruising along the Pearl River.

On the way back from the river cruise I passed the Guangzhou Brain Hospital. Even their hospital sign was covered in brilliant neon.

Pornographic Chicken

The street the orchid garden was on was a busy, cosmopolitan one with lots of big hotels like the Guangzhou Mariott, and lots of banks. We also happened to pass a great many African and Arab Muslims, often dressed in "odd" hats and robes, really the first non-Westernized garb I'd seen the whole trip. Lots of the restaurants advertised themselves not only in three different languages but three entirely different alphabets: Chinese characters, Arabic script and boring old English with roman letters. We passed a place advertising Lebanese food and one called 1001 Nights. Then we found what is probably the most terrifying billboard in existence:



I almost wish I could understand what the words being squawked out the chicken's butt were supposed to say, but that really cuts down on my ability to wildly speculate, so I'll make do with things being the way that they are.

After seeing this come hither chicken we headed back to the subway to return to the hostel. After we emerged from the subway we met the other chicken. She was parked outside of a little shop and had been all day, with a handy puddle of water to drink from and a flagstone to perch dejectedly on for hours on end. Her little comb was flopped to one side.





She must have been somebody's pet, because she was always there in the daylight hours when we passed by that tree, but after dark she would be gone. Not really a streetwalker chicken, not really a daywalker either.

I opted for a quiet afternoon spent melting beneath the ceiling fans, reading more Sherlock Holmes and catching up on The Internet. Brennan went out and foraged for a while, finally coming back from a pastry shop with some really interesting goodies. He had almost brought an entire cake, because some of them were lavish and glossy and very strange looking, but instead he brought just a little slice of fruit tart. He also had some green bread, which he thought would be like the melon bread he tried in Japan, but ended up just being studded with red beans and vaguely sweet. He also brought kiwi milk, which tasted sweet and dusty and a little acidic all at the same time. The pièce de résistance was his find of what looked like cute little cakes decorated like sushi. He took one bite into his sushi cake and discovered several dismaying things. 1) Though the "rice" part of the cake was made of a spongy yellow cake, the wrap was authentic nori seaweed and 2) the center of the sushi roll cake was made of some sort of fish paste. I stuck to kiwi milk and fruit tart and green bread, it seemed safest.

When I got down to the common room in the morning our Chinese friends were already gone (we'd met up with Bryan and Max's classmate Danching who lived nearby and, conveniently, spoke Cantonese) and Max was dejected and glum, either feeling the weight of a trip about to end or a bout of homesickness that could only be cured with loneliness and baozi. I did find Brennan though, so we decided to go out and try our hand at the subway system and try finding a place I read about in the guidebook, the Guangzhou Orchid Garden.

Before we went out to do anything though, we grabbed breakfast from a little place on the same street as the subway station. I was particularly attracted to the large photo placards on the wall, which meant that we could point and gesture at things and probably get that thing to eat. The place served mostly noodles and broth, and it smelled good, so I was looking forward to the meal, but not terribly excited. That is, I wasn't terribly excited until I started watching the man making our noodles fresh to order. To make the noodles he took a hunk of dough and kneaded it and worked it for a few minutes until the texture changed entirely and what started as a lump became smooth and elastic. To shape the noodles he did magic, arcane things with his hands and twirled the band of dough until the strings of dough lengthened and then ! magically became noodles. These were boiled for a minute and then rushed to a different kitchen area, to be covered in some sort of mild gravy and bright green beans.



And this was after I had eaten half of the delicious meal. Brennan somehow managed to eat all of his, which made me feel as tough my little stomach were somehow lesser. I wanted to eat more, I honestly did, but the idea of eating more and then walking around in the extreme humidity just didn't seem like a good idea at all.

The subway was a remarkably uncomplicated procedure, with fairly intuitive touchscreen machines that told us our fare and dispensed little black plastic tokens that felt like crappy poker chips but whooshed us down the track to our destination anyway.

The garden was the perfect way to spend the day, after the neon of the night before and the modern efficiency of the subway and the general hugeness and business of the city it felt like a respite. The Orchid Garden was a jungle of green best seen through a haze of humidity, for that authentic tropical feel. Yellow flowers littered the ground under nests of orchids that hung from tree branches. I sat by a fountain full of koi and it was so hot and so humid that it felt more like beads of water were precipitating out of the air to collect on me, rather than beads of sweat.







Plunging as deep as we could into the garden took us to a quiet pond full of lily pads and apparently--thanks to Brennan's sharp eyes--delicate water snakes. Water snakes give me the willies, but we sat by the water for a long time, partly for the beauty of the scene and partly because it started raining and we had a nice little overhang to protect us from most of the rain.

The City Wall

The next morning we packed up our bags and left them at the hostel lobby in a big heap while we went off to the city wall for a bike ride. The four sides of the city wall make up about eight and a half miles. Bryan got his bike rented first and he was off like a shot, leaving me to meander after at my own pace and Brennan and Max to figure out how to ride a tandem bike.

I would like to present this picture as proof that it is impossible to ride a tandem bike without grinning like a fool.



The surface of the wall was a bit rough, and my bike may as well have been named Rickety. The sun was out in spades, which made it kind of brutal. I had to stop at each of the directional watchtowers to rest in the shade. The orange juice and chocolate from my breakfast didn't think this whole heat thing was a great idea, but there were some pretty keen sights from the walls.










As you can see, by the end of the ride I was red-faced and sweaty, but ever so pleased with my Xi'an experience. From here we headed off to the airport and flew to Guangzhou, capitol city of Canton. I experienced a bout of pickiness and homesickness, all I wanted was recognizable food to eat. I ate a hotdog and a "fruit salad" at the airport, even though the fruits were cherry tomatoes and watermelon. Brennan also shared a potato from his curry and it was so decadent. I missed potatoes.

The Guangzhou airport was all curved glass from floor to ceiling and rain was pouring down it when we landed, so much rain that it looked like someone was standing outside and hosing everything down. We took a bus to our hostel, upping our modes of transportation to feet, bike, plane, taxi and bus (and we could have taken the subway and a boat, too!) The rain gradually slacked off, but the advertisement playing at the front of the bus repeated over and over and over again, so that we got to see more then enough of the 30-second shampoo commercial. I swore never to use Slek shampoo, in fact, if I ever saw that actress sitting on her damn swing thinking about using Slek shampoo I'd probably go and shove her off.

Our Guangzhou hostel was on Bai'e Tan, one of the city's bar districts. We walked past neon lights and live music and more neon lights and found our place, right across the street from the Pearl River. In the evening I walked along the waterfront, looking at flotsam in the river (which was mostly organic, big bunches of river reeds that had washed loose of their moorings) and the neon reflected on the water. Guangzhou was a beautiful city at night, for sheer gaudy neon delight. It was also a beautiful city during the daytime, because its grey concrete apartment buildings were decked with greenery, as each balcony held as many live plants as would fit and true to the humid tropical air, they all thrived by pulling moisture straight out of the air.

Since we were right there on the bar street we went out for a drink--and some heavily/heavenly salted french fries--at the Amigo, which had live music in the form of a woman in a denim shortshorts (bordering on hotpants) and cowboy boots and a man playing a keyboard, I think they were both Filipino. When she wasn't singing the woman dragged people bodily onto the dance floor, so Max ended up out there multiple times, dancing with the middle-aged Chinese ladies who were already dancing. The woman kept coming back and trying to grab me, but I was much more content with my fries and my beers and I would not be moved.