Baud Attitude

Negative Article Disclaimer

As I promised in my other post, I would gloss over the “travel” parts of the Great Wall experience, so as not to detract from the wall itself.  In THIS post, I rant.

It is now my considered opinion that the best way to visit the Great Wall is to do so as part of an organized tour with a reputable group, set up well before coming to China, that picks you up from your hotel and buses you out there along with thirty or forty other tourists, then collects you and takes you home. I am violently allergic to directed travel, so it pains me to type that.

The second-best way, then, would be to take the train from the Beijing North Railway Station, which, at 元6, ($1) is one of the best travel deals you are likely to find. You can even use your metro pass to board!

I did have to wait a couple of hours at the station in Beijing, as I got there just before 8 and the 8:30 train had sold out. Spillovers like myself were lined up outside the station, and sitting ducks for all kinds of entrepreneurial types trying to get us out of the line and onto their tour bus. Fortunately, they are prevented from coming over and physically dragging you away by the combination of a fence and several railway officials who are tasked to stand there and glower.

As soon as the sold-out train had pulled away, however, we were allowed into the station and thus more or less safe.

About an hour before the train was to leave, a buzzer went off and everyone who had been peacefully sitting down jumped up and got into a queue. This was your typical queue in China, which is to say about six or so people wide with a very curious definition of what being “in line” is all about. The prevailing attitude to queuing seems to be that if they can get a hand in front of you that they can then get an elbow in front of you and then a shoulder at which point you are now behind them.  I may be being a little bitter here, as I still managed to get a window seat once we finally got on the train despite all this.

The train takes about 90 minutes and lets you off about .8 km from the Badaling Great Wall, directly into a sea of hucksters trying to sell you hats and souvenirs. If you can make it through them, there’s another huckster gauntlet waiting for you when you actually get closer to the wall.

Then you see the wall, which is amazing. Moving on.

Coming back, the souvenir sellers have called it a day and the people lying in wait for you are now the people trying to convince you that waiting for the train is a terrible idea and you really need to take their taxi service back to Beijing instead. I had one of these guys follow me into the station and into the men’s room, only giving up on me when I went into a stall and closed the door in his face.

The queue to get on the train back is insane. I wish I could tell you that I was able to hold my ground, and I was occasionally able to, but the truth is that I had to watch the back of the person who was originally in front of me get further and further ahead as people cut between us. This was also one of only a couple of situations where I felt friendly hands exploring my back pockets, though we were packed too tightly for me to tell which direction they were coming from. More or less I did my best to ignore them, since the things they were looking for – wallet, passport, etc – were safely tucked away in the zippered inside pockets of my vest.

The rush when the platform doors opened was explosive and unforgiving, for reasons that made immediate sense once I was able to fight my way onto a car.  Unlike Beijing, the Badaling office doesn’t limit ticket sales by anything as pedestrian as how many seats are actually on the train, so every seat was taken, sometimes with three people cramming themselves into two seats, the dining car tables were full, and the leftover passengers were relegated to making do as best as possible.  I found a bare patch of floor next to a bunch of teens playing cards and spent the rest of the trip back trying not to trip anybody.

I would still recommend it as a decent way to get from Beijing to the wall if you’re wanting to see things at your own pace, but really you might want to give a tour group some strong consideration.

Negative article disclaimer

I am glad that I read up on Shanghai before visiting, and learned of the existence of Shanghainese, a dialect of Chinese with lots of similarities but some crucial differences.

For example, the normal greeting throughout most of China is “ni hao”, where in Shanghai it sounds more like “Hello! You want lady massage? Sexy girls!”

And that’s the last joke I’ll make on the topic, because as funny as call girl jokes CAN be in theory, being solicited by a seemingly unending sea of pimps in the Bund ( Shanghai’s touristy upscale neighborhood) was just flat out depressing. The first one was “hah! That was a pimp! A real pimp!”, the second was “huh, maybe they’re working together?”, and the tenth was enough to just make me want to burn the place down and start over. Beijing is terrible in its own way, of course, but at least the sidewalk hawkers there are mostly trying to get you into their terribly overpriced taxi or onto their all-day tour of the Great Wall (and also many fine shopping establishments).

The nadir came in the form of a gentleman who offered me “lady massage? SERVICE massage? Verrrrry young!”

I am known for comments like “oh, <country name here>, don’t ever change!” but in this case I will come down on the side of saying that change would be a good thing indeed.

While Beijing certainly has plenty of touristy things to see and do in town, one of the biggest tourist attractions is actually about 90 minutes away by rail, that being the section of the Great Wall at Badaling.

There were some negative aspects to the trip there and back, but I am going to reserve those for another post so as not to detract from this one.

I legitimately expected it to be something of a let-down. I mean, it’s a wall, right? An awfully long one, sure, but what’s the big deal?

And then I got there and got the barest sense of the SCALE of the thing, and the horrific terrain it was constructed through, and even the most trivial connection to what it must have been like to patrol the thing, and I will freely admit that i was a complete idiot on the topic.

I included a non-cropped, non-resized photo here, if you click on it and follow the wall up until it disappears into the mountains at the top of the photo it might help.  I don’t buy the “visible from space” thing, but I get where the notion comes from.  It just keeps going.

There have only been a few times in my life when I’ve had to step back, look at something, and just let myself be amazed at the notion that human beings actually built it, and this one is, I think, the top of the list for all time.

So, go for the views, which are spectacular, go for the exercise, which is more or less required if you want to see anything, but mostly go if you’re a jaded git who wants to experience a sense of wonder again.

I will also recommend, if you have a spare 元100 in your pocket and enough room in your heart for some Sheer Abject Terror, taking the cable car ride to the top of the nearby wall segment rather than walking up from the bottom. That may just be my 40+ year-old calves talking, mind you, but I think it was worth it, even for the bit where we caught a strong side wind and the car started swinging like mad on what suddenly seemed a very thin cable indeed.

I’ve just returned from two weeks in China, so the next few weeks of posts are almost certainly going to be taken up by talking about what I saw and did there, with the occasional game review because I needed something to do on the plane or on long-haul trains.

Some of my experiences were pretty negative, and I want to apologize in advance to any Sinophiles if I cast your beloved country in an unfair light. I admit that I went to China with a bit of Ugly-American attitude, knowing barely a dozen words of spoken Chinese and hoping that my kanji background would carry me through understanding signs and the like. (spoiler: Whoo boy, no it did not.) I expected China to be, like Japan, very accommodating of English-speaking tourists, and again the truth was somewhat the opposite – the cities I was in do booming tourism business, but it seems almost completely domestic in nature and foreigners are decidedly an afterthought.

I’m also going to make a tremendous number of comparisons to Japan, which is unfair in a lot of ways.  The two countries have developed along completely different paths since the 1940s and Japan has derived great benefit from being able to rely on the US for its national defense; whereas China has had to finish a civil war and deal with the process of post-colonial reconstruction.

Still, I am in the position of not having any editors to answer to, so I can rant as much as I want. I will try to accentuate my positive experiences as much as possible.

I’ll link back to this post from every article where I trend negative.