At 4am my alarm went off.
Ordinarily this would be very, very bad, but seeing as we were going to see the sunrise on the Great Wall of China I decided to allow it.
I wandered around to Andy and Adam’s room, and waited a minute while contemplating whether to knock on the door. Andy came out with his torch and Mike appeared from the half-lit shadows soon after. For no reason any of us could remember we hadn’t really put a lot of thought into asking where we would be going, or how. Apparently what you do is just go back up the way we came down yesterday. I came down on the flying fox.
We knew there was a bridge over the river so we walked down into the balcony/garden area of the hostel and looked around for a path leading over the bridge. There was one but it was down at ground level and we were up at balcony level. There are two big red wooden exit doors at the front of the hostel and we walked out these, finding ourselves at the entrance to the cable car building. In front of this building was a half open roller-gate.
‘Here we go, this way’, said Mike. We went that way but a small, uniformed Chinese man came from vapour and shined a torch at us. We weren’t sure what he was saying, he wasn’t sure what we were saying, but it seemed kind of like ‘No you can’t go this way.’
We tried to mime that we wanted to climb up the hill. We wanted to mime that we would like to see the sunrise. We aimed to mime that we needed to cross the river, to go up the Great Wall of China.
He mimed that we should back through the big red doors and go to sleep. No. Not kidding. He put his hands on his shoulders, laid his head on them, and pointed us towards the doors.
So instead of that we walked around the cable car building and looked for another way around there. There was none.
While we were looking torch-man came and shined his torch again, pointed clearly to the sign displaying the opening hours of the cable car (8am to 7pm), and motioned us to go back to bed. We knew that we did not want to catch the cable car. We knew that we did not want to go back to bed. We were the modern day Argonauts. We would not be deterred.
That’s why we went with (Person X’s) plan of shimmying about 2m down a low part of the dam wall, walking through the garden of the hostel with the torch off, and rejoining the bridge over the river that way. Then we walked 400-500m along the path leading back up the hill before even contemplating turning the torch on, talking about the two large tour buses we’d seen parked near the bridge, and about how those buses must be the reason the gate was open, and about the multitude of other torches we could see twinkling their way up the hill.
Clearly what we were doing was allowed in some sense of the word.
Other things we talked about were:
– Why no one other than Andy had thought to locate their torch the night before for easy access
– Why no one at all had bought any water, or anything to eat other than some Werther’s originals Mike had in his pocket
The walk was surprisingly easy in the dark, even with one torch; every time we thought we were at the top of the hill another tower or two appeared behind the first one, and of course Mike made the steps look easy.
When we got to the top of the hill there was a short section of climb up a dirt path onto a rocky outcrop, where we discovered that we were in fact somewhere up in the heavens and also that every person in China was already there with their tripod set up. My tripod may be smaller but I do know how to use it.
It was still all but dark so I did a couple of practice shots and had a walk and a look around. There was another half-crumbling tower further up the hill which looked like the spot for a sunrise so we kept on moving up there. It was indeed a half-crumbling tower, with a sign at one corner saying ‘This section of the Great Wall is unsafe, under reconstruction, violators fined 200 Yuan, so on and so forth’. Unfortunately all around the inside of the crumbling tower there was a guard rail, which was great for standing on to look over the edge of the wall but not great as a photographic vantage point. That’s how I ended up crouched on the edge of the top of the wall, with my camera set up on a nice flat surface, resting on the small fold-out tripod which came with Alice’s Dad’s old Pentax LM.
About that tripod (and that camera, and the owner as well I guess) I cannot speak highly enough. About the lower back pain I had for the next three days, I will speak no more. It was pretty cold up there, and I think even the Mongolian contortionists we saw at the cultural show would have been uncomfortable. Luckily Andy took a picture, and the sun obligingly came up exactly where we had thought it would, which was exactly behind the top part of the hill that we were all pointing our cameras at.
On the way down the walk actually seemed longer, probably because we could see how far it was, but at least we warmed up from moving, although we were dreading arriving back at the hostel because hot water was supposed to last from 7am to 8am and if we ran we might get back there by 8.05. That was actually about the time we got there, and there was no hot water of any kind. So we packed our bags and got in the bus back to Beijing.
In Beijing we had about two hours to wander before the journey over to the other train station, but having already been to the Silk Market we were fresh out of sightseeing opportunities which were within travel distance of the middle of town. So we just walked around looking to see if we could find 4GB or 8GB thumb drives to back up our photos on, and eventually gave up trying to ‘do’ anything at all. We sat on the grass next to one of the main streets and talked about how Chinese children don’t wear nappies, they wear trousers with an open slit on the back so that toilet-training can begin from age zero.
Back at the hotel carpark where we were supposed to get back on our minibus, at 2.36pm instead of 2.30pm, Lilian informed us that we would still be changing buses, but instead we’d be going to meet the new one halfway as it was stuck in traffic. Also the 1st of October is a National Holiday in China and everyone wants to be home the day before, not on the day, so the train station could be crowded. I wasn’t sure whether ‘in traffic’ was the best place to meet our new bus, but after a few delays, one back-alley bag-switch, and Lilian having a bit of an argument with the driver about where we could and couldn’t pull up near Beijing West Railway Station (Beijing Xi Zhan), we successfully de-bussed in the middle of the carpark with lots of people beeping their horns. The carpark security guard had a funny look on his face. I don’t remember bribing him – maybe Lilian did.
Everyone’s heard those stories of crowded Chinese railway stations, and this one certainly was very congested, if not quite the ‘can’t move forwards, can’t move backwards, can’t breathe’ of legend. Actually it was almost fun because we are bigger than they are so we weren’t getting bumped around. Just proceeding along. But you have to go through metal detectors and put your bags in an X-Ray, and it was this that was causing most of the delay. Inside the station we could sort of walk around, and so doing we found our departure hall (where there was nowhere to sit except for on the floor and right in the way), and we discussed whether there were any airports in Australia bigger or busier than the train station we were in. Sydney Airport… probably. If you count Domestic as well, then yes. International would be bigger but not by much.
Getting on the train involved a long line of people all moving slowly as well, but once we had put our bags either under seats or up on the racks somewhere near our beds, everything was fine. Chinese trains (in the class we were in) don’t really have cabins, they just have three-high rows of bunks set into what is just like a cabin but with no door. You can be in either the bottom, middle or high bunk; 1 and 2 face each other, then there’s a wall, 3 and 4 face each other, then a wall, and so forth. Alice and I were put on the highest bunks across from each other; we couldn’t sit up because of the roof but we could hold hands.
After setting ourselves up we sat around talking, and generally dreaded being woken up at dark o’clock for our arrival in Xi’an.
Greg
