Monday, September 10
Breakfast was a quick affair, bought at the market outside and eaten briskly as we wanted to make sure we were in the lobby of the hostel for 8am (the arrival time of our guide, according to the phone conversation with the rep
. from the tour company). We were still unable to determine if the confirmation email went through (as the internet was still down), so there was some doubt about whether the guide would be able to find our hostel or not. >_
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THE GREAT WALL
We did a bunch of research beforehand. There are a number of different sections of wall reachable from Beijing. Badaling and Juyongguan are the closest, most well restored (rebuilt - read: not historical and no original materials used) and the most popular with tourists. Eh. Also, visiting a section of wall means that you arrive, walk around a bit and then head back down. We were becoming intrigued with tours that involved hiking along the Great Wall from one section to another. The route between Jinshanling and Simatai is apparently a really beautiful route but, unfortunately, Simatai is closed for repairs and is scheduled to open next month
. Damn. So you could, hypothetically, walk towards Simatai from Jinshanling...you would just have to stop about halfway and walk back. That sounded pretty anticlimactic to us.
We settled on the hiking route from Jiankou to Mutianyu. We'd heard warnings that the hike was pretty intense but the scenes were breathtaking. In fact, the majority of the pictures you've seen of the Great Wall have been taken at Jiankou because it is so picturesque...and attracts professional photographers for this reason. The other great thing about this route is that Jiankou is unrestored and crumbling while Mutianyu has been restored for easy of access for tourists. This offers a really neat comparison between the two...seeing the Great Wall as it currently stands, and seeing it as it would have looked before falling into disrepair (sort of). The whole hike would take about 4-5 hours.
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The guide was late, leading us to believe that the whole thing was a bust… but when she did show up, she was apologetic, and hustled us out to the car with a friendly smile
. :)
The company we booked with keeps tour guides on retainer and then, when someone books a tour, calls a driver and a guide with the details. Our guide was a young Chinese girl in her early 20s with pretty good English. She gave us a little schpiel in the car about the history of the wall and what the hike would be like. Once we were driving for a while, it was made completely clear to us that this is not the sort of excursion you can do on your own. While other sections of the wall can be reached by train or bus, Jiankou is further east and rural enough to make transportation by car a must. Because Jiankou is not restored, it is not set up to receive tourists on the same scale as other sections...this means that you are essentially accessing it via a wooded path off to one end of a small village.
We stopped on the way to get lunch stuff (some nuts, pre-packaged sausages and bread… to supplement the fruit we picked up at the market that morning), and then the car dropped us at the base of the trail
.
It was definitely hard-going. The dirt trail was narrow and had uneven ground that made getting a good foothold difficult at times. We climbed for about 45 minutes, covering a total vertical distance of around 100 meters. It was...strenuous and we felt a little relieved to see our guide panting along with us. In the high season, she does one of the Great Wall hikes three times per week. When we reached the top, we were rewarded with a spectacular view (though a bit foggy due to the humidity). We climbed up the wooden ladder to the top of the watchtower and stopped there to eat the lunch we packed. The view was amazing and we couldn't believe that we had managed to hike that high!
After lunch, we began our hike along the wall. The Wall tends to follow the highest ridgelines in the area, so wherever the ridgeline goes, so does the wall. This means that there are parts that climb at angles of up to 80 degrees (we encountered only 50-60 degree angles)
. The weather was gorgeous for hiking! There was at least a 5 degree drop in temperature compared to Beijing, though Andrew found it too humid... "I sweated through my shirt *completely*!" he says. This section of the wall is truly unrestored. Plant-life was taking over, pushing bricks up and out of their places making the steep angles more treacherous than they would normally be. This wall hadn't been touched and the only evidence that other humans had been this way were the sections of beaten dirt path and the occasional (unfortunate) bits of garbage. In fact, we were sometimes paying so close attention to where we were placing our feet, that we would forget we were hiking on the Great Wall until we looked up to take in the surroundings.
Coming upon the Mutianyu section of the wall was like coming across an invisible barrier. One section of wall is overgrown and rocky and BOOM *completely* restored wall. You'll see it immediately in the pictures where this happens
. After this, the hike was (nearly) a cakewalk. We still had a loooong way to go, but at least we didn't have to contend with overgrown shrubs and loose rocks. Up until this point we hadn't seen another soul. A worrying prospect if we were crazy and attempting this ourselves. See, China doesn't really have a "wilderness rescue service" so, if you decide to go off the grid, you do so knowing that no one is coming to your rescue if you sprain an ankle or break a leg. Once reaching the Mutianyu section, we started coming across other, mostly Chinese, tourists. Something that you see a lot, are Chinese girls with giant heels and/or platform shoes on tourists sites. It's a Thing! I don't know why, but about a quarter of these young, female Chinese tourists will have these ridiculous, incredibly ill-suited shoes!
Our guide said that we were coming up on the point where we would want to start thinking about how we wanted to get down off the Great Wall. We had three options: walk, cable car, toboggan
. Walking...well, we've done a ton of that already, cable car seems...anticlimactic and a bit lazy...toboggan - fun and a bit kitschy. Yes! We continued walking, past watchtower after watchtower, up, down, up, down. Eventually our guide pointed waaaay in the distance to where the toboggan was. Apparently, while we picked a very fun choice, it was also the furthest option. Blarg! >_
The toboggan ride was a great reward, if a bit rickety and of unknown safeness (there were numerous signs firmly reminding you that your ride on the toboggan constitutes your agreement that any injury you incur is your own damned fault). It's basically a long metal chute that your cart (on plastic runners) slides down. It twists and turns, and you have to use your brakes, if you want to avoid going up too high on the turns and possibly overturning. o_O! So Shannon went down at chicken speed while our guide, who went down first, said she'd be genuinely surprised if we could catch up to her. We found the driver in the parking lot, made it through Beijing's rush hour traffic and arrived back at our hostel in time for dinner
.
After a much-desired shower, we dressed in fresh clothes and chilled out for a few minutes. Just after Andrew's shower, we got a knock on the door, and Andrew was summoned downstairs. Our guide was there, and had stopped by our hostel on her way home with a parting gift of sweet puffed rice spheres, saying that they've always been a favourite of hers, since she was a child. Awww!! So sweet of her. And they were delicious! See the Chengde post for a photo. :) We headed down to see about finding some dinner, and were surprised to find that the restaurant (see: 3 tables, plus some plastic furniture outdoor seating) next to our hostel did lamb skewers! Oooh man! Nothing calls to you after hiking for the majority of the day like beer and the smell of barbeque. We had too much meat and then a little more meat. Too much beer and then a little more beer. It was fantastic. (Lamb was the highlight, but there were also beef rib meat skewers, grilled green chilies, grilled eggplant and grilled hot dogs… lol)
.
Tuesday, September 11
Today we ventured outside of Beijing for a few days and caught a train to the hill-side city of Chengde (260km northeast of Beijing, pop. 700,000) in Hebei Province...mostly for the purposes of getting out of the city for a bit and for seeing the incredible Imperial Summer Mountain Resort. In the morning, we packed all our things, checked out and had some delicious food next door to our hostel. There's an older lady with a cauldron on hot oil who fries up these parcels of dough stuffed with glass noodles and tofu, like a gigantic pierogi. She also has a pot of soy-sauce-boiled eggs, which are the best we've had here. The old man beside her has a cart with a big insulated pot of fresh tofu (!), and containers of various condiments. You basically get a bowl of silken tofu (still warm), with a dash of pickled garlic, fried shallots, a greenish sauce (no idea), some chili oil, a dash of soy-based sauce, and some fresh cilantro
. This bowl costs 2 yuan. 2! That's $0.33. Amazing.
Due to various circumstances, most of which were crowd-related, we only *just* made our train with 10 minutes to spare. Whew! We sat "soft seat" (first class seat) for the 4.5 hour train ride, which gives us a soft bench seat facing a little table. After a very comfy ride, we arrived at around 12:30pm. The hostel was a very shot walk from the train station and very easy to find. Actually, there aren't any hostels in Chengde, but it appears that an enterprising hotel owner has set aside rooms in his hotel to be used as hostel rooms and has them included in the list of available rooms on HostelWorld.com. Neat idea. For the price of a hostel room, we got a hotel room. I'll take it!
It was definitely getting towards the end of lunch time after we'd settled into our room so we headed out. We followed our route back towards the train station since we had seen some promising places on the way
. A place bustling with working class folks looked promising so we went in, to every. Single. Person. Staring at us. Haha. Woah. It was a Muslim restaurant (the sort that doesn't serve beer), and their huge poster menu was the same as one we'd seen last year in Xi'an. We selected a couple of dishes of noodles (Andrew's in soup, and mine with a stir-fry and sauce over top). Lamb, and very delicious! After a friendly goodbye, we headed out.
On the way back to our hostel, we stopped at a local convenience store, and loaded up on snacks, and water. Included were little deep-fried dough balls soaked in sugar syrup (deadly), some smoked sausages, some fruit treats, and some bitter almonds! (The sort they make Amaretto out of…. Delicious!) We went back to the hotel room and had a really, really great afternoon of chilling out. It was wonderful and very vacationy...our first vacation-like relaxing. The hotel had ethernet-based internet, which was pretty damn fast, for China
. This allowed us to get caught up on e-mails, blog posts, pictures and watch some tv. In the evening we went out for dinner. Back towards the train station again! The restaurant looked pretty busy, so we went in and sat down. As with the restaurant in Beijing, our server dropped our menus, and then stood by the table waiting for us to order. The menu was easily 50 pages! Errrrrgh. >_
Back to the room, and we were delighted to crawl into a soft bed for the first time on the trip. Yaay! Lol.
Wednesday, September 12
Breakfast was included in our hotel stay and is available every day between 7-9am. We came in towards the tail-end at about 8:30 and the buffet was pretty much dead...and a bit shady-looking… o_O There were soy-boiled eggs, a selection of salad-type dishes ( cabbage, preserved radish, long bean, and cucumber), and steamed bread (bao-si… unstuffed). The server also dropped a pitcher of hot milk (soy milk, maybe?) which we drank as we ate
.
Knowing the Summer Mountain Resort was a short walk away and that it was open until 6pm, we took our time getting ready and walking over. Chengde is easily 5-10 degrees cooler than Beijing and with a LOT less pollution...coupled with the fact that fall is approaching, you get that beautiful cool, crisp, refreshing air that early fall gets. GORGEOUS! The sky was blue with the odd fluffy white cloud and sunny, but not too sunny. We followed the river all the way to the Summer Mountain Resort and paid our slightly pricey(...for China anyway) entrance fee and walked in.
The Summer Mountain Resort was the getaway of the early Qing Dynasty emperors (until one of the emperors kicked it while on the property and succeeding emperors superstitiously shunned it afterwards) and was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994. It was a lot like the Summer Palace in Beijing, but larger and far, far fewer tourists. The Resort has several different sections that are designed to reflect the different regions of China while others are lifted from paintings or inspired by poems
. We walked around the extensive grounds which, like the Beijing Summer Palace, have large bodies of water all over. Wandering aimlessly and enjoying the gorgeous weather, we stumbled upon a rockery that was a lot of fun to clamber over, passed by a man playing traditional Chinese music (whether he was amazing or terrible, we'll never know… it sounded rather like some psychopath knifing a cat… again and again and again…). We walked north through the park, along the lake shore, and climbed a massive Buddhist pagoda, getting a great view of the surrounding area, and huge rocky mountains surrounding the property.
We stopped for some snacks beside the Mongolian yurts - actually round fibreglass buildings designed to look something like yurts, while managing to look nothing like yurts. There were about 25 of these buildings, placed where the Mongolian contingent of the Chinese empire would actually have set up their yurts. The modern recreations are a Mongolian cultural centre now. We weren't really hungry enough for a proper lunch, so the snacks really hit the spot
. We continued on through the "Grasslands" area, completing the circle around the lake and ended up back where we had started. About 3/4 of the grounds are forested areas (one of the main purposes of the Resort was for being used as an imperial hunting ground) which we didn't see due to lack of time. We would have preferred to walk the paths rather than take the bus tour (with accompanying blaring megaphone in barely discernible Chinese), but the paths are about 13kms long and we weren't interested in a walk that strenuous...especially with no way of quitting halfway. On our way out, we passed a group of middle-aged and older locals ballroom dancing to Chinese hiphop… lol. Check out the video. Awesome.
We left the Summer Mountain Resort and took the same route back to our hostel. The parkettes along the water were now clogged with groups of Chinese men playing very serious games of cards, Chinese chess and mahjong. The largest crowds were gathered around the tables with the most money on them
. Up until this point, we had not seen a single other Westerner in Chengde so we were getting stares from nearly every person we passed… more so from the elderly folks. ^_^ On the way back to our hostel we passed a street vendor selling whole little chickens, spatchcocked, and cooked on a rotisserie over charcoal. Andrew couldn't resist! We snagged one (only 18 yuan, or about $3), and took it back to our room. It was delicious! After relaxing in our room for a while, Andrew figured he wanted to go out for Sichuan for dinner. There's a popular local place that has a few locations, one of which is across from the railway station.
With the Sichuan restaurant in mind, we headed out, and went into the likeliest restaurant in the area. Turns out it was the restaurant we were looking for! Same problem with the server hovering by the table…. Ugh. We took our time, and she eventually wandered off to see to another of her tables, giving us a reprieve for a few minutes. We ordered a version of Ma Po Tofu (the spicy stewed tofu with chili oil and ground Sichuan peppercorns ), we also ordered a plate of fried beans (the sort that you would shuck and dry, but picked green), which were served with garlic, ginger and lots of fried chilies. Amazing. The main course we ordered was a bowl of steamed pork belly, on top of a stew of spinach, potatoes and chilies. It tasted a bit like it had been prepared in advance, and then steamed to take the chill off it… the idea was driven home by the speed with which it came out of the kitchen (less than 5min after ordering). Ah well… still damn tasty.
A couple of beers later, we wandered back to our hotel, passing a square with about 200 middle-aged Chinese women doing a aerobic dance routine in synch. Hilarious and awesome.
Down by the Beijing, where the watermelons grow...
Friday, September 14, 2012
Chengde, Hebei, China
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