It's Sunday morning in Beijing. I finally got a good night's sleep and some time to blog and exercise before meeting up this afternoon with the amazing Kaiser Kuo. I have almost filled up my camera with shots & managed to bend the connection doo-hickey on my camera-to-USB cable. Kaiser thinks he can fix me up.
When I do, I will share some great shots of our China 2.0 Road Trip to the Great Wall. I know. Nearly all of you have been there and done that, when it comes to The Great Wall of China. First built, 2000 years ago to keep out the Mongol hordes from the North and rebuilt in 910 to stave off invaders, it has been about as written and photographed as much as anything in China--except maybe this year's Olympics.
But you have to stand on it, to fully get what this Wall is about. If you extended it from its series of curves and hairpin turns, it would extend from San Francisco, to Boston, then down nearly to Miami. It's construction is very much like any of the great castles of Europe. There are main defense turrets. We visited the most remote portion accessible from Beijing, or "The Jing," a fascinating hour's ride north of the City's thriving downtown.
The "we" is six guys who actually represent about six countries. The China 2.0 tour, produced by The China Business Network provided a comfy van into which were assembled elliottng of the US; Jens Threanhart (Twitter: jensthreanhart), a German living in Vancouver; Beijing local Winser Zhao (Twitter: winserzhao), who has a travel business and served as our expert guide; Yen Lee (Twitter: yenlee), a partner with Eliott in Uptake of Palo Alto and Beijing, born in Vancouver and David Feng (Twitter:DavidFeng ), a Beijing native who carries a Swiss passport.
David, who speaks my language with a perfect British accent will serve as my interpreter when I speak at CNBloggercom later in the tour. I labeled David, "The Chinese Scobleizer," for his relentless Tweeting in the van, and during our entire two hours we would spend on the Wall. I meant it as a dubious distinction, but he seemed pretty proud of it.
The van picked David and I up at the elaborate Beijing Marriott City Wall at 7 am and meandered north picking up other members of our entourage at different spots as we headed North. In North Beijing, we ate breakfast wraps from a vendor stand (which cost 22 cents USD). I had been heavily warned not to eat food from the street--mostly by Americans who have not been here. I found it delicious and apparently went down easier and healthier than a McMuffin would have.
As we headed north, Beijing's modern, urban density fell away. We found ourselves driving on near-empty 8-lane highways, surrounded by tens of thousands recently planted trees. We passed large patches of farmland that often had small walls built around crops, cleverly protecting food from the North China cold. Agriculture is an important issue for China, as tens of millions of people move from the countryside into cities the country of 1.2 billion people is now a major importer of food while a generation ago it easily fed its own populace. We went through little villages, of one-story homes--most of them in good shape, where rural people lived. In from of many of them were large pads of corn or bricks drying in the sun. We passed a small playground where kids were shooting a basketball. The sandlot was adorned by two inexplicable plastic palm trees.
Many of the building signs were bilingual. I asked who, in this area that obviously had not yet been inundated by Westerners like me, they had talked time and expense to write subtitles like "Welcome to Thousand Fruit Orchard."
I just loved this ride. I love getting out of cities and seeing untouched places. Of course most of China has been recently touched. In the Maoist Era--remembered with obvious contempt, by most Chinese, nearly all of the country's, 5,000 years of building and artifacts were leveled and rebuilt in an austere, perhaps, Russian-styled fashion.
This pastoral countryside tour ended abruptly when we got to the Great Wall parking area. This, as I said, was selected because it is the most remote place to visit the Wall. And we were there in the non-tourist season, if there is such a thing. There we encountered, bus after bus after bus, after car after people assembled by clothing color codes. We parked and the immediate tourista tumult worried me. We headed uphill, past scores of aggressive wampum merchants in stalls onto a cable lift that brought us to the Wall.
There, the dense crowd split in half, some people heading downhill to the right. We opted to go uphill to the left and toward "the Wild Wall," which has not been repaired since 910 BC. As we walked a few hundred, sometimes steep meters uphill, the mobs slipped away and we were left with a thinner crowd, mostly of school children on tour.
Each of us had to stop several times. The uphill trek is tough enough. I had some pride that I was with a group of guys whose average age was about half of mine and I could keep up with them. That is except for David Feng. He long and lanky and 25 and took the top of the wall like a goat after fresh grass while contently tweeting every micro-incident on our trip.
I cannot tell you what it is like to stand on The Great Wall of China. It is breathtaking in beauty; humbling to see what was physically accomplished in this place at the time Christ was born. My brother and mother have stood on this Wall nd now I have as well. This somehow had special meaning for me.
We got to "The Wild Wall," and hike a bit beyond it, determining that the lack of people was offset by the fact that it was a steep and at times perilous hike up. We turned around and worked our way back to the Cable Cars. I stopped to buy a couple of T-Shirts for grandchildren at a hawker's booth. Elliott Eng serve as my interpretor-negotiator. We would later discover that he had done a miserable job of getting me a good price. Still two ids t-shorts for about $10 wasn't so bad.
On the way back to The Jing, Winser had the bus pull off into a rural neighborhood. Apparently people open their homes and feed neighbors, visitors home made food for a small price. We knocked on a door where the woman declined, but she sent us to a very local restaurant, where we enjoyed a fine multicourse meal that filled all six hungry guys up. Total cost for six of us was about $20. Again, it was tasty, healthy and clean food. We were warmly received, but no one made a big deal of some foreigner stopping by for lunch.
Last night, we had a dinner for about 30 Beijing locals, many ex-pats now living here. I met SiokSiok (Twitter: @Sioksiok), the Singaporean film documentary producer who lives in Beijing about half time. After, dinner and watching the amazing face change opera, SiokSiok, took me up a very popular local nightlife street, where we stopped for a beer in one of the oldest bars in Beijing. The owner came over to greet her as an old friend.
I had never met Sioksiok in real life, but we had become pals on Twitter. When we met in real life, I once again had the unique experience of meeting an old social media friend for the first time. We were instant pals. In fact, if it were not for social media, where I met Isaac Mao, and was discovered by Christine Lu (Twitter: @christinelu ) of The China Business network, I would not have been invited to China. I would not be speaking at CNBloggercon and I am extremely grateful that all this has happened.
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