Wednesday March 16, 2016

Great day on the Great Wall.

Chairman Mao once said (as I weakly paraphrase an already apocryphal quote) “Holy cow! That’s a big frickin‘ wall!” I kid of course, Mao was an atheist, and never would have called a cow “holy” obviously. His actual words were more to the effect that any Chinese person who made the effort to walk on the Great Wall was a hero of the revolution. Well, if that’s the case, then we have a room full of heroes right about now.

But lets back up a little bit first. Prior to our excursion up and across said Wall, not one of us got anything remotely resembling a good night’s sleep last evening. The kids were all up from around 2am in their room as Dorothy and I tossed an turned in between sporadic bouts of restless slumber in ours. Not good times. Our bodies are in time zone purgatory, punishing us for flip-flopping night and day with little to no recompense. This is the price one pays for travel in the jet age, so henceforth we will shut up and deal with it. You’re welcome.

After a breakfast of noodles, rice, and steamed buns — much to the children’s delight — we were collected by King Arthur the tour maestro, and our efficiently nameless driver to make the trip through Beijing traffic to the Great Wall about an hour away from the hotel. Any drive through crowded Chinese streets raises a very important question: how exactly is China not the global capital of vehicular manslaughter? The inherent danger of driving in China is not a function of malice but of seeming indifference towards all life, even — and sometimes explicitly — one’s own. Right of way is an abstract thought as pedestrians, bicyclists, and drivers engage in a ubiquitous battle royale to see who’s will cracks first and yields to the dominant, alpha road hog, whomever that may be at the time. Horns are used almost as a punchline, sounding a furious blow well past the moment when any substantive utility could have been brought to bear through its utilization. I can only assume one must be born into the chaos to accept it because I could never see an outsider ever able to adjust.

After a stop for lunch, we arrived at the Great Wall and were confronted with a choice: do we A) take the “safe”, enclosed tram roundtrip up and down the mountain in order to reach the Great Wall, or do we B) take a “much less safe” open ski lift to the top and return via wheeled toboggans on a metal halfpipe back down to the bottom when done. By the way, the preceding quoted phraseology came directly from our own Arthur, who, while a helluva nice guy, might want to work on his salesmanship. Then again, maybe not since we went with option B, perhaps secretly hoping that we would simply die on the mountain, up or down, and be spared the drive back to the hotel later. Either way, you’ve gotta die of something. This way we simply increased the odds that the date of our inevitable demise had moved up to the present.

No one was as shocked as ourselves that we actually made it up to the Great Wall safe and sound. And while one may question the level of creativity behind the simply named Great Wall, it is impossible to argue with its aptness. The back-breaking labor and sheer nerve that must have been required to complete the construction of the Wall over such inhospitable and, frankly, knee-knockingly horrifying terrain is astounding. We walked a several mile roundtrip across the wall, ascending and descending steps of such diversity in rise and run that one marvels at the sadistic sarcasm of the original engineers. The views are stunning. The scale majestic. The experience unequalled. Hopefully the visit of our three Chinese ex-pats even managed to crack a smile on the preserved face of Chairman Mao inside his hermetical tomb.

So I don’t know if you happen to be a parent, and if so, to what extent you might be willing to go to protect the lives of your children but after today, I can safely say that in our case, the lengths to which we would go is: not very far at all. You see, today we allowed our children to gamble with their lives — with our blessing (well, my blessing anyway, Dorothy was decidedly much more circumspect) — and take what can only be described as a hurtling deathtrap down the side of a mountain. As described previously, the slide down the side of the mountain was, charitably, totally devoid of any and all safety measures. And we threw our children into its maw. Here’s a representative example of what passed for “safety precautions” on this hell-slide: at one point I was apparently moving a little to quickly down the track for the taste of one of the bored gentleman dotting the side of the run at random intervals (whose only job one must suspect would be to mark the crash sites and cover the corpses of the dead in some type of condiment that would draw the regional mountain lions in overnight to dispose of the carcasses naturally) placed a wooden stick across the halfpipe directly in front of me! I can only assume the message was “either slow down and maybe I’ll remove the stick before it decapitates you, or you can become mountain lion food — totally your call”. Obviously I slowed down enough to suit the safety marshall for he removed his stick the split second before I literally lost my head over it. Oh, and the kids made it down safely as well.

Once we reached the bottom, thrilled to have cheated death for at least the third time this day, we re-boarded our tour bus for the trip back to the hotel. Since our brains were incapable of facing another threat of imminent loss of life, all of ours simply shut down and forced us into a temporary coma that passed for napping to the untrained eye. Fortunately, we made it back alive and after a quick dip in the hotel pool, a tasty dinner in a nearby restaurant, and some more walking (because hey, if you can’t be killed while inside a moving car, why not take the chance of getting hit by one while crossing a Beijing street?) we returned to our rooms and turned in for the evening.

So a very eventful — and ultimately enjoyable — day all-in-all for the Congiustas touring China. Tomorrow we hit Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, and a few other sights at Arthur’s discretion. No word yet if bungee jumping or bear wrestling are on the agenda, but hey, it’s China, so you never really know…

Cheating death one tourist attraction at a time…