Day two of my trip to Beijing and this time I was on one of those Chinese adventure tourism group things. By Chinese adventure tourism things I mean going on a Chinese tourist tour is an adventure, rather than it including bungee jumping and the likes. The previous day I had bought a ticket to go and see the Great Wall of China with a tour and was now (8am) anxiously waiting for the tour bus to pick me up from the hotel.
And what an adventure it was indeed: all I wanted to do was to go and see the great wall … but no! When you go on a Chinese tourist tour you must first see the magnificent hall of jade whatsits where you can also quite conveniently buy gazillion tons of that jade stuff – it’s lucky you know! This is then topped with a trip to the Chinese herbal medicine shop, just in case you might find your chi slightly out of sync or your joints aching in anticipation of that great big wall that I am sure must be our next destination right? It’s the whole reason that I am on this trip in the first place!!! … Several hours later, one huge jade shop and one superfluous and completely out of context Chinese health shop later … we were finally on the way to see the great wall (at 11.30am!!!). Sometimes I think they do this so that when you finally reach your destination you can’t but love it … even when they expect you to climb their great big wall at 1pm in the afternoon, in 35 ‘C of blazing heat and being utterly annoyed by jade.
But I tell you, once at the wall, all those jade, chi, jing and medicine nightmares were thoroughly forgotten. That wall is huge and quite spectacular! Spanning over several hundreds of kilometers – that’s the section I went to alone, not the whole thing! – it looks so majestic and grand as it twists and turns along the mountain ridges. We walked from gate 14 to gate 6, so 8 kilometers in total, and it was amazing. They say they constructed this wall to be impenetrable and very difficult to walk on and they were right. I mean it looks easy to run along, but actually the steps are so narrow and awkward that it’s really quite hard work. The second best part of the wall was the toboggan slide back down the hill. For a measly 40 RMB you could take a 10 minute windy toboggan slide back down to the car park … which was just the best fun.
Not having had enough Chinese adventure for the day, back in Beijing, I stumbled across yet another version of ‘food street’ – of which there seems to be one in each town, offering different delicatessen creepy-crawlies. Beijing’s specialities: scorpion, bugs, starfish!!!, various inner organs of dubious animals, slimy things on sticks and … well you get the gist. Oh and deep fried crickets! Also on a stick … and what they do with the sticks once they’re done: they put them in a bin …
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