China Part 3: Hostels and Hiking

When my trip to China was being planned, travelling in China was not on my to-do list. There were just too many practical issues. I wouldn’t have enough time; I wouldn’t have enough money, blah blah blah. I would just stay in Chengdu, where it wasn’t exactly like I would be bored, and one day in the long distant future when I’m not a poor student any more but (hopefully) a career money with some cash in the bank, I’d return to China and explore properly later.

But then I got to China, and I got jealous of everybody talking about all the travelling they’d been doing, and someone said, “Hey, let’s go to Beijing for a weekend!”

I thought about it.

For all of about two milliseconds.

Carpe Diem, as they say.

So ten days after I landed in China, I found myself back on a plane and Beijing bound. We managed to book tickets on the 07:30 Sichuan Airlines flight out of Chengdu and were in Beijing nice and early.

We stayed at Sanlitun Hostel, in the Chaoyang district, which we found on hostelworld.com. It was perfect for what we needed; not expensive, and it had a small restaurant/bar where we could grab breakfast or a drink in the evenings, and it was only 20 minutes or so away from Tiananmen Square and the like, which was where we headed first.

We started out in Tiananmen Square, which aside from being extremely large (it’s the largest public square in the world, and can hold over 1 million people) is perfectly unassuming, and it’s hard to relate the square as I saw it to the famous tank man picture taken during the infamous events of 1989.

It’s home to the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, the National Museum of China (or something like that, I forget exactly what it was called) and a large monument in the centre which Google tells me is the Monument to the People’s Heroes.

It’s also roughly where you go to get into the Forbidden City, which was the imperial palace for the emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties. It was listed by UNESCO as a world heritage site in 1987, and you can see why. It is extremely impressive. The buildings are huge and ornate, and the gardens were beautiful. You can’t really go to Beijing and not visit.

That said, there are drawbacks to visiting. The Forbidden City is also the world’s largest palace complex (the Chinese like to be the biggest, apparently!).

Seriously. Once we got inside, it seemed to go on and on and on and on forever and ever and ever. I thought I was going to die there, old and grey, if I didn’t melt first. (Not really). There are so many courtyards, one after the other, and after a while, everything began to look the same and all we wanted to do was find the exit, which took a while. Also, even though it was a weekday, we are slap bang in the middle of peak season, and the crowds were pretty bad.

So – if you ever go, here’s my advice. Don’t go in the middle of summer, when it’s at its most boiling, and make sure you get an audio guide or something, so you actually know what you’re looking at (rookie mistake, I know, but there we have it).

We also had a bit of a weird food moment in the Forbidden City, when I was dared to buy a pea flavoured ice cream. I shouldn’t need to tell you that it was absolutely vile, and went in the bin pretty quickly. (Also, out of curiosity, I looked up #peaicecream instagram later on, and apparently if I had actually tried to eat the thing, I would have found actual peas on the inside. Gross)

Luckily, food for the rest of the weekend was perfectly fine. That night we went to Gui Jie and found a restaurant to have some proper Beijing Peking Duck, which (when it arrived – we were sat waiting for it for ages) was tres bien.

We essentially organised our Saturday around the tours that were advertised in the lobby of our hostel, so we started the day by heading about 70km northeast of Beijing on the coach, hopping on to a chair lift and up a very large mountain to see the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall of China.

I don’t know what was more impressive, really: the fact that this wall, crawling over mountains and through thick trees, was just so massive – it’s quite the commanding site – or the fact that something so massive and it was built by hand. On said mountains, through said thick trees, and from the middle of the 6^th century, no less.

Anyway, once we got to the top and took a few lots of photos, we decided to hike towards one of the many watch towers on this stretch of the wall, and the last part open in that direction before the dilapidated section, and then head back and do the other direction after that.

This proved to be a bit optimistic.

The mid 6^th century Chinese builders did not build the wall with 21^st century tourists in mind, and in places the stairs up to this watch tower were so steep that the staircase was essentially vertical. Rock climbing gloves would not have gone amiss (okay, I exaggerate, but seriously, climbing the wall took effort. When they say that you go hiking on the wall, they mean it, it’s no gentle stroll!). It also did not help that on the wall; the temperature was at least 40°C, with little to no cloud cover and little to no breeze.

Anyway, having sweated out at least half my body weight, we got to the top (yay!) where there was a little man selling bottles of water. He wanted ¥20 for one, which was a bit steep when we’d been paying about ¥3 in Beijing, so I didn’t buy one. Looking back, this was exceptionally stupid, given just how hot it was, and given that the man only wanted what was essentially £2, and this was probably one of the reasons why I ended up severely dehydrated by the end of the weekend, but perhaps I can blame said dehydration for my pig-headedness (Can’t I?)

Still, the wall was very impressive and offered some seriously brilliant views of the valleys around the bottom of the mountains, and we really couldn’t have gone to Beijing without going, could we?

Going back down to the bottom of the mountain, we took a slightly more interesting route than we had on the way up. We tobogganed down, which was quite fun (if slightly alarming on the sharper corners), and then went to a restaurant for our lunch, which was included in the amount we’d paid for the tour, and which turned out to be a lot bigger that I’d been expecting. We definitely got our money’s worth :)

When we got back to Beijing, we showered up and grabbed dinner at the hostel before heading a few minutes down the road for a show put on by the China National Acrobatic Troupe, which was also really good – there was a contortionist, and a juggler, some seriously cool stuff on a tightrope and loads of other stuff. You can see why the Chinese win so many medals in gymnastics, with the way this lot were jumping around. They must put so many hours of training in to do what they do – would you want to climb onto a tower of people balanced on a moving bike? I wouldn’t!

After the acrobatics show finished, we got back on the subway and went to Wanfujing’s snack street. It’s packed with food stalls which served some seriously strange street food – live scorpions on sticks, anyone? No? How about starfish? Still, it was actually really fun to meander around and look at the good and the stranger elements of Beijing, and we all did a bit of souvenir shopping.

Next morning, we decided to head back to Tiananmen Square and go to Mao’s Mausoleum, which is worth a visit if taking a few hours out of your day to see an embalmed communist leader is your thing. This was a simple enough plan, except that when we got to Qianmen station, we emerged into what can only be described as chaos. When we had been to Tiananmen Square on Friday, visiting hours at the Mausoleum were already over, and it was quite quiet. We wandered up to the Forbidden City with no problems.

Not so this time.

People were queuing up to get through security in droves. There were thousands and thousands of people, none of whom knew the definition of queuing, all of whom knew the definition of queue jumping, all of whom were happy to yell and scream and elbow the people next to them to get through quicker. Similar behaviour when we actually got into the square; similar behaviour when we actually got into the queue.

Then the realisation that we weren’t actually allowed to take any bags into the mausoleum. Helpfully, there were no signs anywhere to point this out, and the City Guide by TimeOut Beijing, which we’d been relying on, also very helpfully neglected to mention this. So (once we’d eventually established what the problem was and where I had to go to solve it) I had to dip out of the queue, head to the opposite side of the square to deposit our bags, and then wrestle through queues and security again to try and get back into the queue, which was exhausting. And then we spent an hour and a half queuing to get in (under relentless sunshine and with no water, seeing as we weren’t allowed our bags or anything really in the way of possessions, which just led to us feeling simply awful later).

It was actually this visit to the Mausoleum where I really saw for the first time that, for all its friendly façade and influx of capitalist brands, China is after all a communist country. When a big figure dies in the UK, or wherever, there’s obviously some public mourning – think Princess Diana, and the like – but it goes beyond that in China. It’s not just your average respect for the dead: there is a personality cult surrounding Chairman Mao (I mean, there’s a giant portrait of him adorning the entrance to the Forbidden City, which predates the communist regime by thousands and thousands and thousands of years!)

When we finally got close to the Mausoleum, people were buying yellow flowers, which, when we got inside, they laid in front of a giant statue of Mao, usually bowing at him several times. And then of course, there’s the fact that they embalmed him in the first place, for people to go and gawk at.

It’s an interesting phenomena, particularly when you take this in the context of a simple google search - the Cultural Revolution, or the famine caused by the 'Great Leap Forward', which killed 30 million Chinese peasants, or thereabouts, in between 1959 and 1962... I don't claim to be particularly knowledgeable about Mao, and I'm sure he did good things for China, but there is a reason he has his critics. 

It’s all very odd, and slightly uncomfortable.

Anyway, after this brief interlude (we were only actually in the mausoleum for about five minutes, after all that), we went and got our bags, and some lunch, and headed over to the Temple of Heaven, which is another complex of China’s ancient sacrificial buildings (the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvest is the most famous part).

It’s also yet another UNESCO World Heritage site – China has 47 of these, second most in the world behind Italy, who has 50. I managed to visit a fair few of them in the short time I had.

By this point, though, I think the heat just got too much. It was extremely hot, we were sweating faster than we could replace the water, we’d done a lot of walking, and although we had time to do at least one more thing if we had wanted to, I think if we’d tried, one or all of us would have ended up with pretty severe dehydration and heatstroke. So we headed back to the hostel to freshen up and hang around in the air conditioning until it was time to head to the airport for our flight back to Chengdu.

Obviously, Beijing is a lot bigger than just the stuff that we saw. There was loads of stuff that we didn’t see, like the Summer Palace, the Ming Tombs and the famous Olympic Park, and that’s just the sights, not the real Beijing. But we just ran out of time, (and I suspect we wouldn’t have been able to summon the energy to do more in any case, it was just so hot).

Still, it was a really good weekend, and I’m so glad that I went and got to see a little bit more of China while I was there. It would have been silly to travel more than 5000 miles to somewhere I am extremely unlikely to be again very soon, and not make the most of it while I could.

I know this was another super long post, but you can’t go somewhere like China and not have a lot to say about it!

Next Time – China part 4: Tianfu, Tinder and Tea

Vicky xx