Winter Adventures on the Great Wall

NORTHERN CHINA

FEBRUARY 2021

Below are a few random excerpts from "Traveler's Tales: Volume II" which is currently in the works and follows "Traveler's Tales: Sights and Stories from the Road" which is available on Amazon.

(Some names have been changed to protect the innocent...or just because I forgot.)

In troubled sleep the city waited. Those final hours, just before the morning rush as fifteen million people collectively gritted their minds against the inevitable scream of alarms and babies, bedclothes bitterly peeled away and tossed aside, heads aching against the strain of movement. Those heads, eyes still closed, soon to be bobbing amid the roar of subways and city buses, catapulted out into an unpitying day. The boss, the schoolmaster, waiting for numbed limbs once more straining to a purpose. 

Soon then. It would begin. 

Suddenly beneath my feet a low rumble, the groan of an ancient dragon awakening from centuries of slumber. The earth shuddered and then calmed. The first metro train of the morning had passed underneath, running below Nanjing Road, northwards through the city of Tianjin.

Just after five then. I quickened my pace, following a path northward, zigzagging among market streets and back alleys to make up time. As I walked, moving through the pungent air, heavy with spices, incense, and the previous day’s garbage, I could hear the clink of dishes, the shuffling of feet, and the awakening of the city still behind closed doors. Occasionally, a beam of light was cast out into an alley through the back door of a kitchen, already taking orders which would soon be picked up by the swarming Waimai drivers on their yellow and blue electric scooters. Hungry mouths awaited. And as I passed the warm aroma of freshly steaming rice purified the air, propelling me forward.

The passing metro had begun to spread aftershocks through the city. You couldn’t hear it yet, but you could feel the pulse building as if somewhere, unseen in the dark, a looming conductor stood, hands raised above a grand and waiting orchestra of life, baton balanced expertly between sinewy fingers, poised to drop the first mighty downbeat of the day.

My pace quickened again. They would be waiting already, outside the Gulou metro station. Kevin Zhang, our driver, had told us he needed to have his vehicle out of the city by six o’clock to avoid a heavier tax.

 [. . .]

We were skimming along a stretch of foggy highway northwards, away from the city, amid industrial and farming towns. Each town was punctuated by a soaring stubble of apartment blocks, grouped like huddled figures in the mist, linked each to each by a silken thread of highspeed rail, propelling the population to where they would serve The People best. And then, between these clusters of buildings, nothing. The vast, open void of China, stretching out for thousands of miles into the still-dark west.

“It’s still warm here,” Kevin said suddenly, and the four foreigners in the back of the van jolted awake, snatching their earbuds out. “But we go up to the mountain, so they say it may be cold. Even snow today,” he concluded.

We all shrugged and settled back into our seats. It was still far too early to be worried about the weather.

But Kevin continued, no doubt trying to keep himself awake.

“See how far we get. Beijing province can be closed with quarantine.”

“I heard that it was,” cut in Colin, an American and a frequent customer of Kevin’s driving services. As a matter of fact, he had used him so much when taking daytrips here and there that Kevin had offered him a free trip, as long as we all pitched in for gas. Colin was something of a star customer and Kevin was looking forward to a day out with these four foreigners as one-of-the-boys, rather than as a paid driver.

“If the border is closed, I will take you to the wild wall,” Kevin assured them.

Our plan for the day was to visit a section of the Great Wall that we had thus far not seen. After living in China for several years, we had each visited the popular, tourist portions of The Wall multiple times, but Kevin promised that he knew of a section that most people never got to see. It was his job. He had made it his business to become an expert in shuttling foreign guests around the countryside in search of unique driving adventures. And he did quite well at it.

The car again fell silent as we drove on into the morning. But the day was refusing to brighten, and as predicted, we were soon driving into heavy clouds and dropping temperatures as we began to wind our way up higher and higher towards the mountains which lay to the North of Tianjin.

 [. . .]

It had already begun to snow when we stopped at a small town just at the base of the mountains in search of breakfast, and a light powder of white was beginning to build on sidewalks and parked vehicles. 

A number of street-food vendors lined the sidewalks, offering a wholesome breakfast of local fare. But we were not in the mood and hurried by them towards a bright and modern building not far away. Over the door, a familiar yellow “M” welcomed us. This was, after all, modern China, which meant that a McDonald’s or a Starbucks, and quite often a KFC and a Pizza Hut, were never far away, even in a small town like this one.

After entering our orders through the automated touch-screens, we waited for our numbers to be called.

One of the other guys approached me.

“Dan Stewart,” he introduced himself. “Don’t believe we’ve met.”

“David,” I returned, extending my hand, in hindsight an odd gesture seeing as we’d all just spent the past two hours crammed in the back seat of a van together. “No, I don’t guess so. I work at the Xiaobailou center.”

“Ah, right on. I’m at Aocheng.”

All four of us were English teachers. Honestly, if you met a foreigner who was living in China, there were high odds they were an English teacher.

“When’d you start with us?” Dan continued.

“May 2020. My old school went bankrupt with the lockdowns. Well, bankrupt and then ghosted us all, salary-wise.”

“Yeah, King’s, I heard about that. We got lots of new teachers out of all that.”

“Worked out in the end,” I concluded.

Our food arrived and we ate hurriedly, taking our coffees with us for the road ahead.

 [. . .]

The room was small and bare. Mat and Dan had found swivel office chairs to sit on, while Cory and I sat on a low bed against one wall. Kevin leaned heavily against the opposite wall.

The three policemen who had ushered us inside had gone to another room to phone their Beijing headquarters and figure out what to do with these four foreign guys and their Chinese driver who had approached their remote provincial border outpost in the early hours of a cold and blustery day in February. And not just any February. The nation, and the world, were reeling from the previous year’s still-ongoing pandemic and many cities, Beijing included, were locked down and quarantined.

“Well this’ll make a good story,” Dan said, breaking the silence. 

“Says the guy who left his passport at home,” shot in Colin, crossing his arms. 

“Not just me,” Dan corrected. “Mat’s not got one either.” 

“It’ll be fine,” Kevin assured us.

We had arrived at the border and had immediately been told to pull over. Upon seeing who was in the car, and that two of the foreigners did not have their proper identification, the confused policemen had brought us inside to wait while they worked the situation out.

Soon one of the officers, an elderly gentleman, returned to the room and collected our phone numbers, which we gave to him in halting Mandarin.

“Hao, hao,” he replied, visibly flattered that we had spoken Chinese, even if it was bad Chinese. He left again after having a hushed conversation with Kevin, glancing at us with a smile as he went out.

“He says we cannot go more north to Beijing,” Kevin explained. “But don’t worry, I have another place to take us.”

Soon all four officers returned, handing Cory and my passports back to us and gently reprimanding our companions for traveling without theirs.

“Ok, time to go,” announced Kevin, and soon we were all outside in the snow, heading towards the van. Just as we were about to get in, one of the policemen came running out and beckoned excitedly for us to return.

“Oh shit,” Cory breathed, and we were all satisfied to allow this comment to sum up the general feelings of the group.

As we slowly shuffled back towards the station, the other three officers joined their partner outside, grouping close together and indicating that we should as well. Suddenly one of them produced a smartphone and gestured for all of us to gather in close.

It was selfie time. And so, as Kevin stood and laughed at the spectacle, the eight men leaned in, smiled, and immortalized the moment, standing in front of the small, countryside outpost on a freezing winter day, during a global pandemic, somewhere along the closed border of Beijing.

 [. . .]

We had arrived.

“It’ll take a bit of a hike to get up there,” Kevin warned. “But the wall is there. The wild wall. Nobody comes here.”

The van was parked by the side of a narrow mountain gorge, near what we were all assured was a trailhead that would take us up towards the ruins of a section of Great Wall that tourists were generally unaware of.

“But first,” Kevin stopped us. “It is cold day and I worry you need help to stay warm.”

He produced a bottle and a stack of plastic cups from the back of the van, handing us each a cup of amber liquid. 

“Irish Whiskey,” he announced proudly.

And so, bodies warmed and hearts fortified, we four headed upwards into the mountains while Kevin stayed behind to watch the van, satisfied that he was performing quite well as host and guide.

There were already two inches of powder on the ground as we set off, in search of ancient ruins and new adventures. 

[. . .]

There were two groups of people on The Wall that afternoon.

After a couple of hours hauling our freezing bodies through the snow, and finding only vague piles of worn stones that may or may not have once belonged to a wall-like construction, we had returned to Kevin and the van and had all decided that enough was enough with the wilderness. So we had driven another hour to a more visitor friendly section of the Great Wall of China. There, paying the small entrance fee, we had embarked on a much less ambitious trek up a very well-restored section of The Wall that stretched for about three miles up into the surrounding mountains.

It proved to be steep and perilous going, however, as the snow continued to fall, now forming a three-inch blanket of slippery loveliness over the already slippery stones of the Wall’s steep incline, worn and polished by the feet of millions of tourists.

But we managed not to slip...much...and avoided broken bones.

Finally, we made it to one of the towers that mark peaks and stopping points along all portions of the Great Wall. There we encountered the second group of visitors crazy enough to attempt the Wall that day.

A group of about fifteen college guys approached, also seeking shelter within the tower. Excited to see the foreigners, they quickly extended a local’s hospitality and invited us to accompany them as they explored the area, and soon we were slipping and sliding our way back down the wall in search of something that lay at the bottom and that the guys had assured us was worth seeing.