RadioRoryEarly Arrival In Beijing
The plan was to stay with friends in Shanghai for a week and then get myself to Beijing, where I would join a tour group for a 21-day trip through China, Tibet, and Hong Kong.
My Shanghai host was about to return to the U.S. without seeing some of the sights in Beijing (even though his wife and kids had), so we both decided to grab a bullet train for the big city. About equal to the price of a cheap plane ticket, the train takes almost four hours and is awesome. It makes a half-dozen stops along the 750-mile route and our speed topped out at 302-kph, or about 187-miles-an-hour. And that thing was right on time.
We hired a private tour guide for the day (the same guy who escorted my host’s wife and kids on their Beijing tour). He arranged tickets and took us right where we needed to go, making the one day my friend had in the city VERY efficient.
The first stop early in the morning was the Great Wall. Parts of it stretch across three-thousand miles of China and it’s in various states of decay. We went to Mutianyu, a spot that’s been rebuilt and tricked out for the benefit of international tourists. Located about 45-minutes outside Beijing, you take a chair lift up a hill to the wall and then you ride a toboggan down.
Had I known this was in the works, I would have bought 10-tickets just to ride up and down all day long. Get there early, because it can get crowded when the big tour buses arrive.
Climbing onto the wall for the first time, I must say I had a bit of a moment.
Like most anyone, I wanted to see the wall, but you’d do a lot of reading before you saw it on my bucket list. For some reason though, climbing onto the wall, turning to my left, and seeing this tower, there was a wave of emotion that hit me like a ton of bricks.
Selling the house, my car, and my stuff, quitting my job, leaving family, 15-hours on a plane….it all seemed to hit me for the first time that I am setting out on a hell of an adventure without much of a net.
If seeing the wall tops your travel list, well here’s another tip: Don’t go in the summer. It is brutal. The mid-July heat combines with poor air quality to zap your energy. Luckily, there are a few refreshment stands strategically placed along the wall so relief is never too far away.
There was one English-speaking lady who made me laugh. While we were getting ourselves “re-hydrated,” the woman asked the shopkeeper the price of a soda. She was shocked at the price (around $3, I think) and refused to pay, complaining to her husband that they were gouging visitors.
That little shop, run by an older man and his two grown children, is basically a tent, two card tables, a Coke fridge, and some plastic lawn chairs. They got all that inventory to the top of a hill and on the side of an ancient wall and are standing there in 100-degree temperatures and you’re complaining about the extra buck!?!?
I ordered another beer to cover any profits the old man lost to the cheapskate. That’s the kind of guy I am.
I wish I had photos of the toboggan ride down the hill, but they weren’t allowed. I feared the toboggan trip because I knew I wouldn’t fit on the four-wheeled hunk of plastic. The worker took one look at me and grabbed a bigger cart that was kept off to the side, put it on the track and sent me on my way. It was perfect. There was a group of 20-something women in front of us who, I hoped, would go fast enough down the track to make it more exciting, but they were on the brakes like little old ladies. Me, I was just happy to feel a cool breeze for the five-minute ride before getting back to our van and returning to the city.
When back in Beijing, we did a quick drive-thru of Tienanmen Square and went to the Temple of Heaven, sites I knew I’d see in more detail during my upcoming tour.
Then it was back to the train station for my host’s return to Shanghai.
I stayed Beijing and did a bit more exploring before the big tour began.