Hiking History

When people think of China, the Great Wall is among the first images that come to mind right behind the scrawny kid with half-face glasses winning a computer game competition and before a bedazzling contest, but maybe that's just me. Unfortunately, with a billion people all raving up for China's Coming Out Party during the Beijing Olympics, the last place a tour-group-hating traveler wants to be is the Great Wall of China.

The solution was to drive to a portion of the Wall in a different province and hike ten kilometers on the Wall back into the district of Beijing. Two hours plus and one road checkpoint later, we reached a section of the Wall without the lines of mega buses and the perky tour guide flags that I have grown to dispise.

A couple in Inner Mongolia hiked the same portion of the Great Wall and forewarned us that if we didn't outrun the vendors at the very beginning, they would stay with us the entire time. Jogging a kilometer is not really a challenging feat except when being performed on the crumbling stairs of the Great Wall that had degraded to such an extreme in some spots that they were nothing more than bits of pebbles in a steep decline. Our up and down climbing would be appropriate in a chase sequence of a Scooby Doo episode.

The older vendors gave up fairly quickly, but some of the younger men were still in pursuit, taunting us to try and out run them. What they weren't expecting was someone who understood their language well enough to turn around and yell at them to stop. The ringleader, who I selected to confront, had a few choice words for me, which I only recently learned but never used. Still, they backed off.

My friends and I kept a brisk pace and kept a guard tower between us and where the more determined vendor-stalkers maintained a distance. They finally stopped chasing us around the seventh guard tower, which could be due to the fact that climbing a sixty-foot ladder would be less steep and less treacherous than the hazardous incline of the that part of the Wall.

The guard tower at the top was more intact than many of the others we had seen so far in that it still had a roof. Light filtered in from the windows splashing spots of illumination across the miniature maze of the tower's stone columns. Looking out, the Great Wall zigzagged to the horizon, haphazardly thrown on the ridges and into the valleys of the mountain peaks like a child's forgotten toy train track, still mostly intact.

The rest of the hike was serenely breathtaking. We did give the bored Wall guards something to do when we accidently climbed to a ancient guard tower off limits. We discovered belatedly that the Wall on the other side had collapsed.

Contrary to my preconceived misgivings, trekking the Great Wall proved to be one of the highlights of our trip even with the predatory vendors and pulverized steps. For the sake of all the future China explorers hoping for a shred of authenticity, I hope the Chinese government never gets around to "restoring" this section of the Great Wall, though ziplining down to the bottom of it was really fun!

Beijing: Olympic Countdown

The timing was completely unintentional, but I happened to move to China during the same year that Beijing is hosting the Olympics. Those cuddly mascots are plastered on posters, tee-shirts, the sides of buildings, and everything in between. The Olympic Games are given credit for every major accomplishment of modernity and justification for both the opening and closing of the country. Needless to say, this year has been very interesting.

I arrived in Beijing expecting all the colorful festivities of Disney World on Christmas day on whatever anniversary they decide to celebrate that year. While I enjoyed the specially designated lane on the highway for the Olympics, I was not drowning in Beibei, Jingjing, Huanhuan, Yingying, and Nini mascot merchandise like I thought. A month out from the Olympics, Beijing seems to have made massive progress; however, it still might have a little way to go.

1. With the exception of Hohhot, Longji, and the area around Tiger Leaping Gorge in Yunnan, many people in the service and tourism industry speak at least a little English. Unfortunately, Beijing appears to be lagging behind that curve. So much for the English-First campaign whose advertisements appear everywhere.

HOWEVER, I am really practising my Chinese. In addition, I stopped by the Pearl Market to buy a fleece and found most vendors' English could rivial some of my native level Engilsh students. Non-Chinese speaking purse buyers rejoice!

2. Similar to number one, the friendliest, best English speaking taxi drivers huddle around the mega-tourist sites like the Summer Palace to lure in hapless foreign tourists and charge ridiculous non-metered prices or tack on Olympian stadium tours.

HOWEVER, we did have an adorable taxi driver pull out a laminated card from his visor when I told him where we wanted to go. He tried to match the Chinese characters for the major tourist attractions with the English words that correspond. Of course, I was speaking to him in Chinese and the place we wanted to go doesn't seem to exist anymore. The effort was endearing regardless.

3. Beijing built a huge new terminal to handle all the air traffic but built it far away from the other two. Travelers will have to know which terminal that they need, which is probably not going to be the case for many foreigners.

HOWEVER, I managed to correctly "guess" the word for terminal, which is NOT in my Lonely Planet phrasebook based on a conversation that I had with a Shangaiese taxi driver weeks ago. Everyone else is out of luck.

4. The subway closes at 11PM. My friend and I barely made the last train after only dinner and a stroll around a new hip walking atreet. Younger Olympic goes hoping yo celebrate their team's win in shotput or archery might have difficulty getting home if they don't know their hotel's cross streets.

HOWEVER, the subways are excellent. They are modern and are easy to use.

5. In an effort to clear all the air pollution to give Beijing uncharacteristic blue skies, China has been seeding clouds and forcing it to rain...every day. Unfortunately, if they succeed, pasty Westerners are going to be caught off guard when they can't buy suntan lotion though skin whiterning products are always readily available.

HOWEVER, all the rain and landscaping have made Beijing explode with color whne I've never heard Beijing described as beautiful before now.

6. While the subways are great, the bus system needs some work. We never managed to catch a single bus eventhough we tried a couple of times. Sometimes Lonely PLanet was at fault when it didn't specify where to catch the bus. Other times were more frustrating like how the bus station for the Summer Palace is impossible to find.

HOWEVER...well, I can't think of anything positive about this one.

AFter such a tragic year for China, I hope the Olympics are everything that China hopes that they will be. Still, lets hope in the next month that the government makes a few more improvements.

Home on the Inner Mongolian Range

Up to this point in our cross-China journey, my friends and I have not really veered much off the China tourist path. Longji Rice Terrace was slightly less traveled but still appeared in flyer advertisements plastered around Guilin and Yangshuo. Weighing the tourist factor based on how many pages are dedicated to the place in Lonely Planet China, the city of Shanghai has fourty-one pages, the city of Xi'an has fourteen pages, and the vllage of Yangshuo has ten pages. Our next stop is significantly more rugged. The entire region of Inner Mongolia has only twelve pages. Hohhot, the largest city in the area, doesn't even have its own listing.

I'm fairly convinced that Hohhot has only one guesthouse and that situation is only because the owner of the elite guesthouse is very entrepreneur. The owner picked us up at the airport in his family's beat-up sudan like he would a visiting family member. When we arrived at the guesthouse, his wife hurried us into the kitchen for welcoming tea.

We weren't staying at a guesthouse, not really. We were staying at the family's home, which they opened to foreign tourists. Their toothbrushes were neatly stacked on the shelves in the bathroom and their clothes hung on the laundary line in the courtyard. We even watched a Ricky Martin behind-the-scenes documentary with the owner's twelve-year old son, Donetello, while we waited for dinner to be served.

We were tired from our Xi'an trip and would have been happy with just a simple rice dish for dinner, but the owner's wife had something else in mind. She spent nearly three hours preparing a traditional Mongolian mutton dumpling dish that was simply phenomenal. The meals was one of the best that we have had on the trip.

Travelers come to Inner Mongolia to visit the grasslands, and we were no different. Instead of staying in one of the fenced off "tourist camps" of yurt-shaped cement, we spent the night with the guesthouse owner's Mongolian family friend on the grasslands. In the morning, the owner, his son, his niece, his college age friend, who spoke English almost fluently, and the three of us piled in the van like we were going to visit grandmother's house.

When we reached the range house, we were ushered into their yurt in front of their house for additional welcoming milk tea. Around the tea were bowls and small dishes that I could not identify. They turned out to be items that could be added to the tea like a grain called millet, Mongolian butter, something that looked like cheetos without the flaming orange cheese, and something that tasted like flanks of pie crust. I became fond of the Mongolian cheese. It had the crunchy texture of how I would imagine pool chalk tastes, but it still had a sweet aftertaste that I found intriguing.

We spent the day roaming around the grasslands and playing with the family's goats, particularly one energetic baby goat that tried to eat my camera. We horseback rode to a crude circular tower made out of tiered levels of stone and honored the Mongolian tradition of circling the monument three times while tossing stones at it. As far as we could see were the rolling hills of grasslands blanketed with silence except for the whistling of the wind.

That night we tried on traditional Mongolian formal dresses with our surrogate family from the guesthouse. We made a bonfire out of dried dung and gazed at the multitude of stars visible without light pollution of any kind. One other fire was spotted miles away but other than that interference, we had nothing but stars.

A day later we went on another "family outing" with the college-age friend and the owner's niece to the Gobi Desert. The desert was an amusement park for Inner Mongolia, equipped with four wheelers, zip-lines, slides down the dunes, and what I can only describe as the DC Duck supped up to roll over the massive dunes. I felt like I was on a desert ship designed by Mad Max.

We rode two hump camels, and I happened to get the only almost pure white one. I affectionately named mine Booboo while my friend named her camel George. We came up with goofy Saturday cartoon-worthy antics for the camels as we rode through the water-smooth sand.

When we left Inner Mongolia, it felt like we were leaving an adoptive family. Our experience in the region certainly goes well beyond the twelve pages denoted to it in the brick-size Lonely Planet guide. Inner Mongolia proved to be the perfect respite in our cross-China trek.

Travel Nightmares and Intriques

Traveling always involves a few headaches: delayed flights; traffic jams; travel buddies who suddenly become arch enemies when finding themselves in a room with four other girls and one bathroom.

Since early March, I have researched, organized, compared, and confirmed the cross-China trip with two of my childhood friends to the point that I actually used grading as a break.

Even with as meticulously thought-out plans, problems arise that leave people racing through airports or spending the night with their head down on the bathroom floor, wishing that they had remembered to pack stronger upset stomach medicine.

We were already tired when we reached our guesthouse in Xi'an. I spend weeks looking for this hotel alone since I did not like any of the standard hotels in the ancient city.

The guesthouse that we reserved used to be a former emperor's brother's house and is a beautiful traditional stone building with three internal courtuards. The residence had only been open as a guesthouse for a year and five days (according to the manager, who I got to know really well before we left Xi'an).

We checked in, planning to flop our bags down and grab dinner before heading to bed early. I was already thinking about how nice it would be to relax as the front desk receptionist handed me our key and told me that we had a four bed room without a bathroom. I halted my hand midgrab; I reserved a three bed room with a bathroom and confirmed it...twice.

The receptionist's response was, "We held your room until today. The family staying in the room couldn't get train tickets and wanted to stay another night."

I dealt with the isses without anyone at the hotel losing face and without being anything but respectful and patient; however, when told over and over again that they reserved the room until today and that excuse expected to allieviate all our concerns was a little trying.

It took two hours. The manager was called. The "Big Boss" was called. Half a dozen other hotels and hostels were called. The manager ended up paying the difference between what we owed for our reserved room (up until that day)and two rooms in a hotel nearby for the first night in Xi'an. The second night we returned to the guesthouse and received the penthouse family suite with the bedroom on the vaulted second story. Not bad for never raising my voice.

On many occasions Chinese tour groups have been a major obstacle for my China teacher friends' travel experiences (flashback to Huangshan); however, we only came to Xi'an to see the Terra Cotta Warriors and joined a tour through our guesthouse to do it.

The unscheduled visit to the extinct for 6,000 years Banpo camp was interesting, mostly because we went there first in the morning. The tourist trap banquet was not amusing at all. The foor was a step-up from Chinese airplane food but not much more. The drinks were hot: hot straight-from-powder orange juice; hot straight-from-powder corn juice; hot straight-from-powder watermelon juice. The temperature forced tourists to pay fifteen yuan for a cold drink as the waitresses made abundantly clear. Ours kept yelling "cold" in Chinese at me when I bulked at the price. The Chinese tourism industry still hasn't quite mastered the art of subtlty in some cases.

The town outside the Terra Cotta Warriors is also bazaar. The government took the land from the farmers who discovered the "eighth wonder of the world", and it built the farmers a modern town to make up for the land-grab for historical significance. The townhouse subdivision was a Chinese fascade slapped on a Western design. Take away the Qing era roofs with dragon corner statues and throw on some shutters and the neighborhood would fit in comfortably in suburbia, USA. The attached garages were particularly out of place.

The town square with its water fatures was in the wrong continent. Put in a few more trees and take out the impromptu statue of the Beijing Olympics characters, and it could have been Brunswick or any other small town in the midwest.

The solitude of the town gave it an eerie quality. The new buildings stood empty with a dust film on all the windows. The scattering of vendors set up small roll-away stands along the main walking street while the store fronts on either side were vacent. I felt like I entered an apocalypic zombie movie but instead of the undead flying through store windows and flooding the town square, ghost of the Terra Cotta Warriors would tackle us and demand their terra cotta memorabilia back.

The Terra Cotta Warriors were fascinating, especially how much of the site still hasn't been unearthed. Of course, the automatic crossbow booby-traps and mercury gas are effecient deterents against opening the emperor's tomb.

Our Xi'an trip ended as borderline disasterous as it began. Our flight times changed last week, and I confusingly thought we were taking the later flight. I happened to check the times at noon and realized that our flight left at 1:40PM. The airport was fifty minutes away. We made our flight and so did our bags, which is lucky because I did not want to use my diplomatic calm to handle negotiating another flight. Hopefully my friends and I have fulfilled our quota on travel nightmares, and the rest of our trip will run smoothly.

Longji Rice Terrace: the Game

I'll admit it: I was mildly obsessed with video games for a few years in my youth. Bubble Bobble was my favorite, and I had pretty decent aim in duck hunt. I outgrew the phrase almost as quickly as I fell into it so that I have no idea what my students are talking about when they drone on about their PSPs

My trip to Longji Rice Terrace brough numberous similarities to some of the best elements of my favorite games.

While toted as being located "outside Guilin", the Dragon Backbone Terrace is actually a three-hour car ride, zigzagging through a rugged mountain range that could easily fit in among the courses of Mario Cart. The amount of switchbacks and lumpy curves would keep the more streamlined mushroom character on his mushroom toes.

We reached a significantly high altitude when the road just stopped, and we had to go the rest of the way on foot. After hiring incredibly physically fit grandmothers to sherpa our bags, our merry party set out up the mountain like Dizzy, the walking, talking egg video game character on a quest for...something or another. While his journey transversed forests and treehouse towns, we trekked a dizzying path through lush gullies and through wooden villages built at such extreme angles on the mountainside that they were given the appearance of dizzy's eggfolk's treehouses (or Ewok residences...pick your reference).

The villages were helter-skelter, multi-level jigsaw pizzles straight out of Donkey Kong, where bridges over fifteen-feet deep duck pond pits could be nothing more than an ancient, wobbly plank. Wooden buildings with second stories jetting out formed tunnels over the path. Gutter-sized open aquducts appeared out of the most unexpected places and contained such unique turns that it would make an amazng waterslide for a hamster.

We reached our guesthouse near the summit with the same level of excitement and wonder as a little kid whose character just climbed up the magic beanstock for the first time to reach the hidden cloud level in Super Mario Brothers 3. We seemed to step into our own cloud kingdom. Our completely wooden room felt like a ship cabin hovering above the rice terraces, which followed the curves of the mountains to the horizon on either side. Directly in front of us, we could not even see the valley where the road ended. The rice patties abruptly stopped on the edge of a cliff, yet somewhere far below was the river and the road. I kept expecting Princess Toadstool to pop up offering milk tea, but it never happened.

After a delicious lunch, we hiked through the rolling rice terraces in the same complex, tiered maze as The Legend of Zelda. We twisted around the mountains and forged up the engineering marvel of the rice terrace steps, where water trickled from the flooded top to the tiers below it.

We wondered along the path on a mission to find the best views. Every once in awhile we would stumble across a waterfall on the upper edge of the rice terrace and would splash cold water on our arms and face. We passed small houses belonging to the Zhaung minority group who lives on the mountain and walked through slender rows of corn when the land was too rocky or dry to grow rice.

My friends and I had to be weary. Hot pink clod women would appear from behind bends, wanting us to pay to see their long hair (since that ethnic group does not cut their hair, and it can reach their ankles). While we enjoyed seeing an enterprising spirit is thriving in rural China, te women were deafly persistent to the point that I felt like Pac Man fleeing those pesky mulri-colored ghosts.

While I might compare our experience to a video game, the area was completely devoid of the kitchy music and flashy nuiances of the games. The Longji Rice Terrace is simply peaceful and a place where a person could completely lose herself for a much time needed.

A Year of Firsts

Everything in China has been a little bit of an adventure and stufffed with firsts from first time being hit by a moped to the first time wading through buckets of live frogs and turtles in a Chinese grocery store. The end of my tenure as an English teacher in Shanghai (and my temporary disappearance from the blogging world) is the beginning of a five-week trek through China with two of my closest childhood friends.

I never realized what I have already grown accustom to until I saw my friends experience it for the first time: the hard beds; the power structure of Right of Way going from biggest to smallest so pedestrians are defintely at the bottom of the food chain; the poetry-worthy deliciousness of street food like xiao long bao; the distaste for forming lines and fondness for shoving; and the absolute insanity of Shanghaiese taxi drivers.

After 50 hours in Shanghai (in a hectic whirlwind that they probably don't remember in their jetlagged stuper) we headed to Yangshuo. Completely bypassing the city of Guilin, I led my friends to one of those odd places commmon in China: a modern art sculpture garden in the middle of nowhere among the unusual mountains of the area. The park was completely empty except for us and dozens of diligently working gardeners.

The village of Yanghshuo has some of the most breathtaking scenery in all China. Tree-speckled mountains pop out of the earth like multi-shaped mushrooms while every sliver of semi-flat land is used for argriculture. I've been here before, and I love the slow pace of the countryside so I arranged a stay in a blink-and-you-will miss it village outside Yangshuo. My friends knew we were staying at a 'farm, but I'm not sure they were expecting freely roaming chickens, sun-baked brick structures that were identical to the home the chickens picked to roost, and wood everything that never fit or closed quite right. Oh, and mosquito nets draped over the beds. The inns were rustic, and I loved it though we weren't expecting an additional cabin-mate in the form of a four-inch long hunter spider, which would rival Roadrunner in a foot race.

Yangshuo morphed into a number of firsts for me the second time in the area. I went rock climbing for the first time. I spend the majority of my time hugging the mountain face as tightly as a sailing mast of a hurricane tossed ship. My legs are covered with bruises to prove it. I did strike up a conversation with a New Zealander while I was stuck about seventy seet up. Turns out he was also a teacher in Shanghai. Funny where you meet people. Regardless of his advice though, I still couldn't get pass the slight overhang above me and slipped. I figured I shouldn't let the professionals holding my rope get too bored since they seem to be able to manage their duties of anchoring the rope and talking on their cellphones at the same time.

In the evening we took a sunset hotair balloon trip, which was the first for both of my friends. We had a little trouble taking off as we hit and almost knocked over a structure on stilts in a rice patty. We also had six people crammed into a basket that could comfortably fit four so that our balloon operator sat on the edge of the basket (half the time also on his cell phone). In addition, the burners were very low so that everytime the operator turned them on, I felt the little curls on the top of my head melting. We were told we had the second best balloon operator in China so I wasn't worried.

Eventually we did make it completely over the top of Moon Mountain and witnessed some of the most unbelievable views. If Doctor Seuss and the location selector of Lord of the Rings combined talent, they might have the right amount of quirk and eye for beauty to create the army of droopy, pointy, and floppy mountains in Yangshuo.

I've ridden in a hotair balloon before, but this experience was the first time we almost took out a water buffalo when we came to a bouncing stop in its muddy pasture.

With our first leg of our trip in China successfully completed, we are leaving the countryside of Yangshuo and heading to the sever, middle-of-nowhere Chinese countryside of Longji Rice Terrace. The rest of the trip will be all first for me.