Construction here is everywhere, and we’ve seen not whole
cities, but whole blocks of apartments being built, say 10 cookie cutter 40-50
story apartments, and then right next door, there will be another big
development of 10 more cookie cutter 40-50 story apartment buildings that are
also all under construction. On the road
today, we saw a thing called “IT City of the Future”, which was also basically
a ghost town – all set to go, but nobody in it just yet.
Everywhere we go, with one exception you’ll read about
shortly, there have been absolute throngs of tourists, and most of them are
Chinese, on tour from other parts of China.
They travel in bus tours, and each group has a matching hat, with a
guide on a loud speaker gabbling away at them.
In this part of the world, I am a big tall guy, which is a new
experience, but as I mentioned before, we are still a bit of a novelty in these
parts of the world.
Despite, or because
of the smog, the Chinese are making an effort to do things in an
environmentally friendly manner. We’ve
seen lots of solar heaters on roofs, we’ve seen LED street lights, an d many of
the local Beijing people have electric scooters or bikes. Michael, our guide, says the Government
recognises pollution is a problem, and they are doing what they can to try and
improve the situation, but with 1.4 billion people, it’s an uphill / losing
battle – propaganda campaign over for today.
Today is one of the big ticket items on our holiday – we’re
off to the Great Wall. The good news for
the day, we see as we leave our hotel room, is that the sky is blue. This is a real surprise, the previous days
have been a smoggy overcast grey – nice warm temperatures, good up close
visibility, but always that blanket of smog lingering a few hundred metres
away. Today though the sky is clear blue
and it is a beautiful day – yay. We’re
heading away for two days now staying overnight at a rustic Tibetan spa lodge,
but more about that later.
Michael and our driver collected us at 9am, after we’d
checked out of our room for a night, and we hit the road for The Great
Wall. First stop, you guessed it, a factory
tour, this time it’s Jade. Jade in
Chinese culture is the most valuable thing they can possess – more valuable
than gold or diamonds. The tour, of
which all of them are fairly brief – say 10 minutes tops, showed us a man
carving the jade, making a series of balls inside each other, from one block of
Jade – kind of like the Babushka dolls, but the inner ones have no way of
getting out. Watching the craftsmen at
work, and seeing the magnificent creations they produce was a great experience,
but everyone’s taste is different, and Jade dragons aren’t ours, so none of it
is coming home to our place.
The next stop was really enjoyable, and a much more relaxing
and cultural experience, the tombs of the Ming Emperors. Actually, it was just the gardens and the
walkway leading in to the tombs, but it was a very peaceful and beautiful
gardens, with many statues of the animals and mythical creatures that are such
an important part of Chinese culture. We
spent a good hour walking through the gardens.
There were 16 Ming Emperors, and 13 of them are buried in the valley
around the gardens we were walking through.
The 3 that didn’t get buried there, generally met with sticky ends, and
were done in by there own relatives in their never ending quest for power. Michael told us about one emperor who was
killed because he had no qualified advisors because he kept having them
beheaded, but after some questioning from us, he had to concede that his
paranoia was probably well founded given the somewhat monotonous regularity
with which his forebears had been done in.
Next stop was lunch, which was also at a Jade factory. Michael’s tour company is very good, as they
always take us to very good eating places, and this one just happened to also
be in a Jade factory. The other thing
that they are very sure to have us visiting regularly is places with “5 star
toilet facilities”. It is this sort of
attention to detail where this assisted touring can add value to us who are so
used to doing our own thing on holiday.
Then we were off to The Great Wall. The sky was still blue and the day really was
one out of the box. Michael told us a
bit about the wall, that it was 6,000 miles long, but that there are lots of
side sections that make it much longer than that. The bit that we are visiting first is what we
all agreed by mutual consent could be referred to as the Disney Wall, because
there is a cable car to take you up to it, and this section has been fully
restored to make it easier for people to walk on. Getting to the cable car meant running the
gauntlet of all the stall holders selling all sorts of tourist tat. To my horror, Anne kept on pointing at things
that caught her eye, and although she had no interest in buying them, the sight
of a woman showing interest in the wares of a stall holders stall was enough to
send them into a frenzy. The stock
conversation went something like this…..”you want”, “no thank you”, “you look
when you come back”, “Maybe”, “I remember you”.
The cable car ride was great, and I think we rode in a
famous one because there was a sticker in the window saying “Mrs Michelle wife
of the American President rode the car to climb the Great Wall on March 23,
2014”. I looked at all the other cars,
but couldn’t see any others with those words in the window. That was car 56 on the way up. On the way down, the car behind us, car 26,
also had the words on the window, so I have concluded that she rode car 56 one
way, and car 26 the other – our moment of fame being over, we alighted to
commence our walk of the Great Wall.
The first thing we noticed was that all the tourists up here
were foreigners, and most of them were overweight, unfit Americans. The only Chinese that we saw while we were up
on the Wall were the ones who were manning the umbrella covered stalls that
were selling drink and tourist tat at regular intervals along the wall. The other thing that quickly became apparent
was that once we had walked 100 metres away from the cable car that we would be
one of only a tiny number of people that were doing a decent walk on the wall.
But the thing that we really noticed was how amazing The
Wall was, and how amazing the day was that we had been lucky enough to walk on
it. We’ve been to a lot of places, and
seen a lot of sights, but this is one of the all-time highlights. The pictures don’t do the experience justice,
but they are the only way that can explain just how good it was. It’s not just the wall itself, but the beauty
of the surroundings that are such a big part of it. Seeing the other tourists struggle to get to
the first tower, we felt really pleased and fortunate that we have the health
and fitness to do a decent walk, and get to the highest point that was
available to day tourists on The Wall.
The tower that we walked to had a sign on it saying no
tourists beyond this point, although we did have to wonder if that really was
an official sign as there was another umbrella covered stall about 100m past
the no tourists sign, so the person on that stall is either incredibly stupid,
or the person on the stall on the tower we got to is incredibly cheeky – I’m
banking on the latter.
We had a really great 3 hours on the wall, took some great
photos, had a good walk on a beautiful day.
From there we headed to our overnight accommodation, which was a Tibetan
Spa Retreat about an hour from the Great Wall, and beside some of the
unrestored sections of the wall that enabled us to do a really cool and very
alternative walk in the morning. But
that is the subject for tomorrow’s blog post, so now I will sign off.
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