Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [29]
And so one day, I found myself on an English-speaking tour bus heading for the Great Wall of China. I was in the general vicinity and felt compelled to at least see it, this wall. I had asked Dan what he, as a titan of the Orient, would recommend for a superior Wall-viewing experience.
“You should hike the Wall from Jinshanling to Simatai,” he told me. “It’s a very evocative part of the Wall away from all the tourists, and you can really get a feel for Imperial China.”
“Excellent. And how would one get to this place, Jin-shin-shin?”
“From the northern Beijing bus station, you can get on a minibus to Miyun. From there, you need to find another minibus to Bakeshiyang. And make sure you take a daypack with food and water. You probably won’t encounter anyone there, and it’s a pretty rugged hike.”
I considered.
“Or I could take a tour.”
“Or you could take a tour.”
Given that I still didn’t have a clue what I was doing, the cocoon of a tour bus seemed, at the time, like a good option. And so one morning I was greeted by a young Chinese man who called himself Tony, which, I suspected, was not his birth name.
“How much you pay for your ticket?” Tony asked.
“Two hundred and fifty yuan.”
“Okay. Don’t tell anyone. Other people paid 300.”
Or 200, and I was the sucker. Nevertheless, the trip to see the Great Wall at Badaling, fifty miles north of Beijing, would soon offer plenty more opportunities for me to divest myself of yuan. As we finally escaped through the ever-sprawling, traffic-congested, filthy haze of Beijing, I listened to the conversations among my fellow tourists.
“I think there’s too much of an entitlement mentality in Europe,” David, a middle-aged denizen of Kansas, was saying.
“I am very much in favor of free trade, but there’s too much government involvement over there.” He wagged his finger at the Frenchman beside him. “And Jacques Chirac,” he snorted, “was a disaster for France.”
Behind David, an Australian Muslim of Lebanese descent was chatting with the Venezuelan Jew sitting beside him.
“Halal and Kosher? It’s the same thing, mate. Arab and Jew? We’re the same people. We’re Semites with big noses.”
Other than David of Kansas, his apparently mute wife, and myself, all the other passengers on this love bus had come to China for business reasons. The Venezuelan had arrived with his equally fashion-conscious brother to buy motorcycles for the dealership they owned in Caracas. The two Australians had come for the Spring China Import and Export Fair in Guangzhou, otherwise known as the Canton Fair, a biannual event that attracts upward of 25,000 booths and nearly 200,000 attendees. A German had just finished a six-month stint on the island of Hainan, where he was involved with a factory making car-engine parts. The Bolivian man was in China to obtain training from a Chinese cell phone company. And the Frenchman stoically absorbing the opining of one David of Kansas had spent his time in China hiring programmers for his software company.
I turned my attention away from David of Kansas and his thoughts about the evils of socialized medicine, and paid heed to the landscape unraveling outside the window. We sped past villages and wound our way around cragged hills speckled with farms. How anyone managed to grow anything here was a mystery I could not resolve. The land was profoundly parched. Once, not so long ago, a farmer in the region wouldn’t have had to dig more than a few feet to establish a well. Now he’d have to dig a half-mile or so until he reached an aquifer. That’s a lot of shoveling. As I watched the barren landscape roll by, Tony pointed out the obvious.
“You see, it is very dry here. We are experiencing a very long drought. So I ask you, on behalf of the people of Beijing,