epiphany

Beijing: Tourist Trapped

Last Tuesday I went to the Great Wall with two older men that I know, Gary and Ken. Ken was just here visiting for two weeks or so, and Gary (and his wife, Barbara) have been teaching in Dalian longer than I have, though I actually speak more Chinese than they do. Barbara had been to the Wall a couple of times and didn't feel like going, but Gary and Ken were both game.

We decided to take one of the tour buses that leave from the south end of Tian'anmen Square, Qianmen. According to our apparently out-of-date guidebooks (or our combined gross misunderstanding), the ride wouldn't be too expensive, and we could spend a nice day at the Wall. The books said that buses #1 and #5 went straight to Badaling, the most famous section of the Great Wall, and the one probably most accessible to seniors. But when I found #1, the sign said "Ming Tombs (Badaling)." We didn't particularly want to go to the Tombs, but we figured that, hey, it's a bus, so we'll spend the time we want to at the Wall and get a later bus back to town. I had found the pick-up spot for #5, but the sign was all in Chinese.

We tried asking the bus ladies about the Tombs thing but didn't get very far with them because of the language barrier. As Gary and I were paying for bus #1, a girl told Ken that #5 wouldn't go to the Tombs, but it was too late at that point. We all boarded and were underway by roughly 6:45am. When we were paying, I think both Gary and I started to get inklings that this wasn't just a fancy normal bus but was more of a real tour bus. As we rode along, that suspicion was confirmed. Everyone else on the bus was Chinese. The bus didn't leave until all the seats were full even though the schedule said 6:30. And the bus lady began to give a tourist-y sounding talk. We, of course, didn't understand a blessed thing (as Americans, we only understand cursed things ;-) ), but it was funny to watch the entire bus full of people swinging their heads in unison left and right, craning to see the latest sight out the other side of the bus.

We arrived at Juyongguan, the section of the Great Wall nearest Beijing, at 8:00am. The bus lady told us to be at the bus by 9:30. Everyone got off; the bus pulled away to the distant lot on the other side of the park. Only then did I realize that we were going to have to pay to visit two sections of the Wall that day. We sort of muddled around taking photos down at the lot level for a little while before taking a look from the Wall itself. Once we got onto it, Gary and Ken decided that they didn't want to go too far in order to keep from tiring themselves out before seeing the main section of the Wall at Badaling. I decided that I wanted to wander.

So a half-hour into our time at Juyongguan I took off up the Wall. The steepness really can't be described. Just saying, "It was a 70 degree angle," doesn't do it justice. The height of the steps ranges between two or three inches and well over a foot, often from one step to the next. Since this section has been restored for the sake of tourists, there was often a helpful (and necessary) handrail. I don't remember how many towers I passed, but it took me half an hour to reach the end of the restored section. I had to use my hands to help climb the stairs in the last tower. And was I ever sweating. It reminded me of climbing the Muir Snowfield on Mt. Rainier last summer, only without the snow. Few tourists had ventured up that far, so I had a minute or so of (mostly) private rest before I had to head down for the bus.

Unfortunately, during my time at the top, quite a few tourists had come to the Wall, and the lower reaches were desperately crowded. I had a lot of trouble forcing my way through the crowds and made it to the bus at exactly 9:30. But when I got on, Ken and Gary weren't there.

I got off the bus, thinking I must have been on the wrong one, but the bus lady urged me back on, asking (in Chinese), "Where are your friends?" I responded (mostly in Chinese) that I didn't know where they were. I had gone to the top, but they hadn't come with me.

The bus began to pull out at 9:35, just as I saw Gary running for the exit. We stopped. Ken and Gary got on, and we headed onward to Badaling.

At Badaling, the bus lady told us that we had only one hour and twenty minutes. I thought that was brutally short, but we didn't have a choice. Gary wanted to take the cable car to the top, so we followed the signs that said, "Pulley." We bought our tickets and began to be a little suspicious. The picture on the ticket was of a small roller coaster. We followed the signs to the "pulley" and discovered that it was indeed a kind of small roller coaster.

Gary said, "I'm getting my money back."

We turned around and headed back for the booth when a Chinese sales lady asked us (in English) what we were looking for. I said that we had wanted to take the cable car, not the roller coaster. She told us that the cable car was about five kilometers away on the other side of the park. "The buses can't go there during the holiday." So we turned around and took the "pulley" up the Wall.

It wasn't as bad as we expected. Going up was just like climbing a long hill on any roller coaster. You're leaned way back, listening to the clunking of the gears, watching the back of the car in front of you. It even had a tunnel reminiscent of Great America's old "Demon" ride.

At the top, a soldier helped pull us out of the cars, which don't actually stop. They just keep on going whether you've gotten out or not.

The Great Wall at Badaling is spacious and wide, maybe 12 or 15 feet across. But to get onto the Wall, you have to crowd through a two-foot-wide stone doorway with about a hundred eager Chinese tourists. After squish, squish, squishing your way through, you pop up the stairs to be greeted on the Wall itself by a bunch of peddlers trying to get you to buy useless trinkets, some--but not all--of which are emblazoned with pictures or sayings about the Wall.

The part of Badaling that we visited wasn't as steep as the Wall at Juyongguan. However, you could see the nature of the Wall much better. When you hear the word "Wall," you probably think of the kind of thing that surrounds your living room, even if you've seen pictures of the Great Wall. Well, if your living room wall is thirty or forty feet tall and twenty or thirty feet thick, you might have a decent idea. But your living room would also have to be pretty big, twisting around, back and forth, over a series of mountain tops and ridges until you can't see it in the distance anymore. The Wall is wind-y. Again, trying to describe it doesn't do it justice. As you look over the hills, it seems like you're facing a series of Walls, one ridge after another until vision ends in haze or horizon.

After not long enough at the top and not being able to wander far because of the crowds and time limit, we took the roller coaster back down. There was a worker riding in the first car using a hand brake to slow us all down. Personally, I thought we could have gone a little faster. We made it to the bus on time (I think the lady told us an earlier time than she told everyone else because we were among the first passengers to get on the bus). Once everyone was there, we headed to the Ming Tombs.

As we drove, I got a good look at the Chinese countryside and had to agree with my students: it's just plain dirty. It reminded me a lot of Kenya's farms. The farmers don't keep things very clean or orderly; the side roads are basically dirt paths, and the soil was more of a sandy clay than anything else. Being from Wisconsin and having an agricultural background, I thought of how miserable it would be to try to make anything grow out there.

Then the bus lady distracted me with her latest talk. I'm still not sure if I was hearing it correctly, but it seemed like every three to five words, she said, "beer" (pijiu). It didn't make any sense at all. "Blah blah blah blah pijiu blah blah blah pijiu blah blah. Blah blah blah pijiu blah boli de pijiu blah blah." You get the idea. (And "boli de pijiu" makes no sense either: "plate glass's beer;" or possibly "homosexual's beer.") I felt like I was some kind of Chinese Homer Simpson. When we got back to Dalian, I asked my teacher if there was another word that sounded like pijiu, but she couldn't think of any. She thought that maybe the lady was trying to talk people into buying beer at the next stop.

The next stop was a jade factory. As we got off the bus, the bus lady was very concerned that we would know the right time to come back. "San dian si shi wu," she kept saying (3:45). Then she found an English-speaking Chinese tourist to translate for us--3:45. I thanked her and said that I had understood. We were more than a little bothered though, because that gave us two hours and forty-five minutes at a dinky little jade factory when we'd barely had that long at the two sections of the Great Wall combined.

After ten or twenty minutes of walking through the factory (they let you watch a little bit of the jade carving process), we worked our way through the vast selection of expensive merchandise back to the outside. The day was getting warm, so we started looking for some shade. As we wandered, we discovered that we actually were at the Ming Tombs. The bus had let us off quite a distance from the gate since they had a deal with the jade factory.

I had read that the Tombs were inexpensive to visit, and you only had to pay if you actually wanted to wander inside one. However, like the information on which buses to take to the Wall, the books were sadly mistaken. It cost as much to enter the park as it had cost to tour the Forbidden City. After having spent too much money visiting two parts of the Great Wall that day, I decided that I wasn't going in. I told Gary and Ken that they could go in if they wanted, but I would just wait outside. They said they weren't really interested, so we found a big rock underneath some trees and sat down to wait for the next couple of hours.

At 3:35 I started moving us back to the parking lot. We got there at 3:40 and began looking for the bus. It wasn't there. There was a bigger parking lot next door, so we checked every bus in that lot as well. No good. We found another bus lady and told her that we couldn't find our bus. She said, "Well, it's 3:45. Your bus is here. Go find it," but she didn't actually try to help us at all.

We checked both lots again. I noticed several #5 buses in the lot, despite the fact that the one girl had told Ken that none of the #5's go to the Tombs. At 3:50, we found a group of bus ladies and told them about our problem. One of them decided to help us, so she ran off looking. I later saw her talking with a different bus lady who had a cell phone. She came back, found yet another bus lady and said, "Go with her." That lady, who spoke no English whatsoever, led us to a #3 bus (which would take us back to a different part of the city) and indicated that we should wait there. It was scheduled to leave at 4:20. We waited at the door, afraid to miss yet another bus. Once everyone else was on board, there were exactly three seats available for us.

As we drove back to Beijing, I did my best to chat with the people around me in Chinese. A couple days later I figured out that I was using the wrong word for "difficult," but oh well. Suddenly the bus turned in at an amusement park. Everybody groaned. Our new bus lady said something over the speaker including the time "6:30." We Americans weren't too happy since we just wanted to get home, and the Chinese weren't exactly thrilled either. I don't know if they wanted to stay longer or what, but I suspect that they didn't want to go in since many of them tried to stay on the bus. The bus lady got off and soon came back on. She said something else and made everyone clear out.

I stepped off the bus, and who should be waiting for us but our previous bus lady. She wasn't happy. She indicated that we should follow her, and as we walked, she told me that they had waited for us until 3:50 and asked where in the world we had been. I told her that we had come back at 3:40 but couldn't find the bus anywhere.

When we boarded our bus, everyone was waiting. Apparently the #1 buses don't regularly stop at the amusement park (yet). I apologized to the people sitting near us. Once we were seated, the bus lady came back with the English-speaking tourist and very loudly asked, "Where were you? We waited for you until 3:50."

I started answering in English but then realized that our defense probably wouldn't be translated nearly as loudly as her question. "San dian si shi, women hui lai," I said so everyone could hear. "Women kan, he kan, he kan, he kan, he kan--gongche mei you!" ("We came back at 3:40. We looked and looked and looked and looked and looked, but the bus wasn't there!" Side note: when I told my teacher about it, she said my grammar was perfect.) Everybody laughed. The bus lady looked a little embarrassed. She went part way up the aisle, then turned and said something I didn't understand in Chinese. Everyone applauded, and we took off. I'm guessing that she said something about the ingenuity of the people rescuing the poor foreigners, though I could be wrong. As for the time differences, I think the bus lady told the Chinese people where to meet but forgot to get the girl to translate that part.

We arrived back at Qianmen around 6:30, met Barbara at their hotel, and went out for a supper of Beijing roast duck. The way they cook a duck in Beijing somehow loosens the skin so most of the fat melts into the meat and the skin ends up crispy. You take some of the skin and meat, dip it into a plum sauce, place it on a small, crepe-ish pancake with some spring onions, wrap it up like a mini-burrito and eat it. It tasted great and was a good way to end a somewhat rough day.

Watch out for Beijing waitresses, though. When we paid, ours tried to keep ten yuan of our change.

Posted by at May 13, 2004 2:24 PM