Bus. McDonald’s. The Great Wall of China.
Which of these entities do you think a guidebook is unlikely to heave heard of? Yet the Rough Guide managed to completely mislead us. The Rough Guide, which I bought only because I wanted to support Kepler’s Bookstore in Menlo Park rather than Amazon and they had the Rough Guide and not Lonely Planet — enough of doing good for the little guy. From now on I am stealing konjac gels out of the mouths of little babies on the bus. These candies were banned in the US because certain parents thought it was their constitutional right to ignore what their infant children were eating, and the FDA has agreed with them on the implication that everything sold in the leader of the Free World should have the consistency of Gerber’s. After the kid was done choking down the konjac cube, he used the plastic cup as a pacifier. The Chinese have the resources and imagination to be the next world leader and I hope some of you will be around in 2080 when their parents think they are entitled to permanent child neglect and ban chopsticks.
Anyway, yeah, Rough Guide. Never buy Rough Guide. They are stupid and disorganized and don’t know if they want to be Young Lonely Planet or Fat Lonely Planet and they told us that the public tourist bus to the great wall, bus 1 or 5, leaves from the McDonalds shown very clearly on their map at the southeast corner of Tian An Men Square. The McDonald’s isn’t there, the bus isn’t there. The Number 5 bus is a local. The Rough Guide is stupid and I think there ought to be consequential damages permitted for EVERYTHING, even Konjac, I have the right never to think.
After we spent a precious hour looking for this bus, and of course being invited onto other tour buses for three times the price, we gave up and bought a package tour of the Ming Tombs and the Great Wall.
I will be a Tourist Guidebook for you right now and tell you what you may expect from every packaged day tour from Gray Line San Francisco to the Restaurant At The End Of The Universe:
- Triple the price but some extras included (in this case the ticket to the Great Wall itself — topologists will wish to note that a wall surrounds the Great Wall so you just don’t go look at it without paying)
- A Lunch Stop at a Gift Shop that lasts way too long.
- A visit to the place you wanted to go to that is way too short.
- A tour guide who will not stop chattering ever.
And that’s what we got for our 160 RMB apiece.
There is a city bus, number 919, that leaves from far north of town. It is also mentioned in Rough Guide and had we trusted them we could have attempted that, but we wouldn’t have seen the Ming Tombs, which are actually a lovely park and considerably more pleasant than the Great Wall.
We were permitted two hours at the Great Wall. It is enough, on a crappy day for pictures, which it was; the smog from Beijing had got visibility down to a couple thousand meters, pure Los Angeles 1959, there isn’t a lot to do at Badaling but be photographed with tourists who admire your beards — Dave was talking to some fellow from Ankara who did not admire his beard, Turks got beards of their own — he was here for an imaging conference of some sort and when his work is done and you can search on flickr for “beards Great Wall Forbidden City” you will find more photos of us than we ever post.
We rode what amounts to a slow-motion roller coaster up to the wall. That was an additional 60 RMB but, I can’t really say it was worth it in any sense, but it is a mode of transportation I have never heard of before and there isn’t much to actually do at the Great Wall but look at it and say, look, it’s the Great Wall. Then you walk as far on it as you feel like, amid crowds that make Downtown Disney seem as deserted as Simon Stylites’s back 40, and then you walk back and you are no longer at the Great Wall but you have been.
A mental trick that keeps you from feeling like you have been terribly cheated in travel, which you always are, is to view the tourism in this way, as a Destination. Let us consider the Lunch Stop at the Jade Emporium. Did you know they sell jade trinkets to tourists near the Ming Tombs? But they weren’t real souvenirs made by local craftsmen, they were all from China. This jade shop was by far the most enormous room of trinkets and tourists I have ever been in. There must have been twenty buses out front. I can pretty much recite the arrival halls at airports I’ve been in that were larger than this room, and they are all at International Terminals for major cities and SFO’s is only barely one of them.
And when you hike through that without making eye contact (there is enough residual Communism in the culture that the touts are at least a little bit subdued) you get to the Lunch Room Of Deer Penis.
Imagine a gigantic room serving free lunch to several hundred people at round tables — and this was not Horrible Chinese Food, either, this was very simple and good worker-cafeteria Chinese food made fresh by the jade lunch brigade: tofu, braised fish, turnips, several greens, onions, broth with noodles — and imagine the walls of this room are stacked about twenty feet high with dried and preserved deer organs for sale in bright red boxes, with posters describing the virtues of deer placenta and deer cauda and of course deer penis, there can be no life without deer penis and we have the photos to prove it. And stuffed deer, who never enjoyed the benefit of long life promised by their being born with such salutary viscera.
What have I missed, really? Here I am in a room I never imagined existed, which is utterly weird and exotic, being cheated out of an extra hour at a place which is a great cliché and looks exactly like the first Dicomed test image you saw of it in 1979 and all the subsequent ones except smoggier.
I wish we had more time at the Ming Tombs. I recommend them.