Advertisement
Published: August 6th 2007
Super Happy Family Adventures Begin: Living a Double Life
Thursday arrived with mixed emotions. When travellers talk about home they get a glazed over look of inexplicable pride and happiness, the concept of home feels good: safety, friends, family, good times, fun times, all the good things from our regular lives come flooding back to us. When you think back on home you only remember the good parts and your wonderful idealised home is the only thing in focus. For me, home has absolutely nothing to do with a place, I left my home town and have no intention of returning, instead my concept of home is solely to do with people. I realised a few months ago that the thing I missed most in all the world was my Dad, even more than food and wine. So I am sure you can imagine the excitement I felt when he decided to come and visit me here in China.
The plan was to travel to the big four destinations in China - Beijing, Xian, Shanghai and Guilin - in 14 days, my dad, his girlfriend Christine and me, the tour guide and translator. Having never been to any of
the destinations and lacking any real language skills it was going to be tough for me to fulfill my duties, but I had the confidence to wing it. At 10:30am, an hour usually reserved for sleeping, especially seeing as I hadn't found bed at anything resembling a reasonable hour the previous night, I was waiting in the brand new airport 30km north of Beijing. Waiting for that first look at my parents, wondering if they'd look the same, trying to form a picture in my head of what they had looked like so that I could complement them on their new hair cuts and/or buff-er figures when they arrived, sort of wondering if I had enough time to run to the toilets.
An hour later I was still waiting, now wondering what particular item that I had asked them to bring me had resulted in a cavity search by Chinese customs, when finally they emerged from the gate. There they were, my mum and dad standing five meters from me, looking just how I remembered them. A surge of happiness mixed with a frightening realisation that I was totally out of my depth in the tour guiding department (when
you can actually see the people you are responsible for the
fear sets in) came over me as I raced up to my Dad and gave him a hug. The crazy adventure had begun.
Mode selector switched, now operating with a facade of total confidence and local knowledge. All questions are now to be answered either correctly or with well prepared lies, whatever happens don't let the tourists know that you don't know the answers. This is what I had signed up for. No longer could I run around the world without a plan and without organisation. I now had to book rooms ahead, organise transport to coincide with other transports, I had to find good restaurants, I had to fit more sights into a single day, I even had to know which way was north. Could this be fun? Would this be as hard as I expected? The three of us jumped head first into the storm to find out. No matter what happened it was going to be great, I was able to spend time with my family for the first time since January.
First stop on the family tour was the Temple of Heaven. No,
scratch that, it was lunch. Priorities must be kept and food is number one, but after that we went to the Temple. This particular temple is the symbol of Beijing, except if you come from anywhere outside of China in which case the symbol would be the Forbidden City (silly westerners), as it is the most beautiful example of Ming dynasty Taoist architecture. The complex was built in 1420 as an altar where the emperor would pray to the heavens for a successful harvest every year and every subsequent emperor of China worshipped there. There are actually several temples in the complex, each with a different purpose (such as the temple where the emperor fasted prior to a ceremony), arranged within a large and luscious park. The serene tree-lined boulevards running to the four points of the compass are filled with Chinese people exercising or relaxing in the afternoons which makes for quite a contrast to the hustle and bustle of inner Beijing (the temple is just south of the old inner-city walls). As we were at a Chinese tourist destination we were of course surrounded by hundreds of tourists taking the one photo that every Chinese person has already
taken, but the hordes didn't diminish the splendor of the temples in any way. I actually think that the place would seem sterile and dull without the people.
After extensively looking around the temples and waiting for my Dad to finish taking his thousand-odd photos we headed down to the Liulichang Hutong: an alley with restored Qing dynasty buildings. Of course the restorers forget one key detail: I'm fairly sure that in the Qing dynasty the street had a wider variety of shops than the collection of antique places that are there now. I brought us to the street with an ulterior motive though, and this is where my double life began. My old hostel, the one where I had a dozen friends to party with, was just around the corner, as were a selection of good restaurants that I knew. So, after exhausting our shopping desires and realising that it was far too hot to be standing outside we adjourned to the hostel for a cold drink. Success!
Introducing your parents to your friends is always a funny thing, not something to worry about but funny nonetheless. When my dad started hitting on my friend Sophie by
helping her play Scrabble I started to worry (he wasn't actually hitting on her, that was a lie). I need to point out that Katie (Sophie's friend that admitted to me that she looked at me as her "sleazy older brother figure") and I won that game, take that Dad. At this point I started plotting, I wanted to go out partying with my friends again and I needed to ditch the family for the night. The plan hatched as follows: take the family to dinner across the road (good Peking duck place), take them back to their hotel by taxi, get a taxi back to the hostel, and do it all before my friends leave. Oh, that sounds easy doesn't it!
In hindsight it was all worth it, living a double life wasn't the hardest thing in the world. Although, trying to be a tour guide is hard enough in itself, let alone when you do it without having slept the night before, and getting taxis across town at random times of the day made it even more difficult, but to get to spend time with both friends and family at the same time really made my time
The First Temple
Still at the Temple of Heaven.in Beijing a pleasure.
Day Two: Cixi, Getting Raped by a Taxi Driver and Not Learning My Lesson
I woke up with a surprisingly small hangover. Considering that I'd ended up pole dancing again in an effort to impress a girl who seemed to take very little notice of me for the third night in a row (perhaps she's one of those people who think that my dancing is horrible, you know, sane people) I was feeling quite spritely when I wandered out to my 9am breakfast appointment with my parents.
My second day of actually seeing things in Beijing was slated as a day at the Summer Palace but because of all the arrangements I had to make for later in the trip we didn't actually arrive till around 1:30pm. That was ok though, I really didn't feel like walking around in the sun all day.
The Summer Palace was built in the north-west of Beijing as a summer retreat for the Emperor (the Emperors usually hung out at the Forbidden City) although I'm not sure how a 20km move makes a significant change in the weather. During the second Opium war in 1860
the Palace was destroyed by the western powers and it was subsequently rebuilt later in the century by the Empress Dowager Cixi. Now, I am not an expert on Chinese history, but from what I've seen, this Cixi lady was a nasty sort. Not only did she have a ridiculously hard to pronounce name, she also usurped several princes and one emperor from their rightful places so that she could rule China. She was clearly a better choice for the position though due to her economic theories: they say that she took a large amount of silver destined for the Chinese navy, a place where it could have been used to do useful things such as ward of the invasions by the west or Japan, and used it to build a silver boat in the Palace grounds (the boat doesn't even look that good). The Palace is one of two places in Beijing that has a hill, the other being the park behind the Forbidden City. The hill was constructed from rocks and dirt dredged to make the three lakes that form the center of the gardens, resulting in a strikingly beautiful parkland of forested hills and water-bound activities. Just
walking around the old buildings and parks was entertaining enough, with the temples, pagodas, bridges and other sights making the Palace truly remarkable. The centerpiece of the Palace is Duobao Pagoda which sits atop a massive stone rampart reminiscent of a medieval castle.
If I were visiting the Summer Palace by myself I would do it without any other plans on the same day as it is a long way out of town and travelling to and fro takes quite some time. I of course wasn't travelling alone and in order to get the most out of 14 days I'd arranged for a trip to see the Beijing Acrobatics troupe that night. Due to an unexpected stop in the "Beijing 2008 Olympics Memorabilia Monopoly Store" (I made that name up, the real one was much funnier) and a guy who asked to borrow our pen and then proceeded to engrave the Chinese characters for "China" and "Beijing" onto it we were quite late in leaving the palace. This would have been ok if two things hadn't happened. The first was that the normal taxis refused to take us and only the "luxury" taxis were available (these taxis charge 3
kuai per kilometer instead of 2) and the second was that Beijing was experiencing unusually bad traffic jams that afternoon. After an hour and a half in that infernal Volkswagen taxi (as luxurious as they get) we had no time left before the bus to the acrobats and a $50 taxi fair from a smiling incompetent. The acrobats were good though, it was worth it all just to get home in time to see the tumbling.
After seeing a bunch of Chinese people spinning six plates while contorting themselves into a knot and supporting themselves upside down by their mouths (that is neither a composite nor an exaggeration), or doing four cartwheels through hoops five foot off the ground and jumping over six of their compatriots, or juggling umbrellas with their feet, or throwing four bowls off the end of a plank which they are standing on which is balanced on a cylinder which is on a small table up onto the head of their daughter who is balanced on their shoulders who at the same time managed to throw a bowl of her own up there with her foot (if you need me to draw a diagram of
that one I can), or doing several other impossible to do or describe things, we went back to our hotel. At this point I suggested a dinner option for my parents and decided to exercise the tour guiding technique known as "leave them to their own devices while you go off and party". Having not learned from the night before I headed straight back to my old hostel.
That was a mistake. We went bowling, had a street party somewhere in Beijing, ended up in a couple of clubs buying glasses of Sambucca for ladies that still refused to take notice and just generally having a good time. Getting home at 5:30am as the sun rose, looking forward to a 7:00am wake-up call so that I could take my family to the great wall. What a life!
You're not a real man if you haven't climbed the Great Wall - Mao Ze Dong
And you're not an Australian if you did it without a hangover. We got onto an organised tour to Simatai, a section of the wall about 100km north-east of Beijing which had the advantage of a four hour bus ride just to get
there (bad traffic) which I used for catching up on sleep. Everyone knows about the Wall, it's by far the most commonly known attraction in all of China, and everyone has seen innumerable photos of it. So what's it like to actually be there, to stand atop the wall and look outwards from China?
Well, it's like standing on the very end of civilisation, it's the single most obviously demarked border in the world. Forget using rivers as borders: people can swim. Forget mountains: people can climb. Forget security fences and forget barbed wire, there is simply nothing else in the world which can come close to the Great Wall. In it's elementary form it is just a wall, a very long wall, but in parts it is so much more. The ancient Chinese people didn't just build an ordinary wall, they built a formidable barrier that is impenetrable because it is just so incredibly fearsome to look at. Think about this: the wall at Simatai climbs from a river up along a ridge-line which goes up a hundred meters or more within the space of only one kilometer or so. The ridge-line in itself would be impossible to
scale in parts yet the wall sits atop it. They could have spared a great deal of expense and labour in it's construction by leaving the steepest sections un-walled, but they didn't which is what makes the Wall so horribly fearsome. When the Manchurians looked upon the wall they must have thought "They managed to build a wall up there? If they can do that what other incredible feats must they be capable of?". The Wall is complete, it covers everything regardless of whether it needs to or not. In front of the wall lies a barren wasteland of inhospitable mountains, behind lies an even more barren landscape. Here in the middle of nowhere, on the most ridiculous ridge-line they built the wall just so that they could thumb their noses at the rest of the world.
The fact that the Wall lies nowhere near the actual border of China and rarely ever did and the fact that the Mongols ran through the wall as though it wasn't even there are somewhat irrelevant. I found the Wall to be awe inspiring and magnificent from the first glimpse. It sits there as a symbol of China and all that China
has achieved, a marvelous testament.
Actually climbing on the wall is even more exhilarating. I chose to be a man and climb from the very bottom up to the very top while Dad and Christine decided to take to cable-car to the top (I also didn't opt to take the zip-line back down to the bus because I was cheap) which made the experience even better. Often I found myself alone on a section of the Wall, watchtowers both in front and behind, Manchurian to the left and China to the right as I climbed. To say steep is an understatement, particularly as some section don't have steps, but nothing could stop me climbing higher and higher. The thrill of being there overtook me like never before as I tried to understand what it must have been like for the guards who used to stand watch in solitude as the sun set centuries ago.
Towards the end of the day I climbed high up to an unrestored watchtower on a secluded section of the Wall. There I sat in a window, looking back across the Wall, as a cool breeze blew through. Rarely have I had the opportunity
to see such an amazing vista, and also, I got to stand on the Great Wall with my Dad. I couldn't have been happier.
Upgrading Train Tickets the Western Way
I woke up the following day at a reasonable hour. Having spent four hours climbing steps the previous day I had been too tired to properly party, as were most of my friends (some had managed to find good excuses not to sleep), and I had actually managed to get to sleep at a reasonable hour. One lesson was learnt for future reference: when trying to impress girls don't let me choose a movie, it's failed twice now.
Being my last day in Beijing I had a lot of organising to do, especially considering one issue: it was peak travelling season for Chinese uni students so I hadn't been able to get sleeper tickets on a train to Xi'an. I couldn't put my parents on a seat for an 11 hour overnight trip so I had instead bought them plane tickets. So now I was stuck with two extra train tickets that I had to get rid of. At the train station I was lining up
at the exchange counter, hoping that they would refund my money, when I realised that a bunch of scalpers were walking up and down the line looking at everyone's tickets. "This could be fun" I thought, and suddenly I start yelling out what I've got, trying to get someone to buy my tickets. One guy looked like he wanted them, I talked them up saying they were legitimate, same day tickets and he ended up buying them off me for 80% of face value. I got most of my money back (more than I would have got from the train company) and I didn't have to line up for an hour!
I still had the issue of organising my parents in a town that I had never been to while I wasn't actually in the town to help them. In the process of getting them to the Beijing airport shuttle bus (and thanks to trying to say one last goodbye to my friends) I ended up well behind schedule and found myself on a taxi to the train station through peak hour traffic with only 20 minutes till my train left. Arriving at the station I found that the
drop-off point was packed with cars that weren't moving so I had to get out of the taxi and run up the ramp between cars to try and get to my train. Pushing through the crowd at the metal detectors, rushing around a massive station to my platform I arrived 30 seconds too late. Bugger.
Lets look at the situation. My parents are going to arrive at Xi'an airport at 9:30pm today, I'm sitting in a train station some 1500km away from that airport without a ticket during peak season. Hmmm, what to do? The answer was to run to the right ticketing desk, plead for ticket on the next train in any class I could get and then see what happens. The station staff was nice enough to give me a standing ticket on the next train without questions which was very much appreciated, but standing for 11 hours didn't sound like much fun.
When I saw the train I was shocked to see just what peak season meant, my carriage was packed like a sardine tin. The entrance ways for full of luggage, people sat on top of the pile, men stood in the aisles, each
seat had two people on it, people brought newspapers to sit on in the aisles, the restaurant car had become an impromptu seating carriage, and there I was amongst it all. One hundred or more people in a single cabin with one westerner. Thankfully, I was a westerner and there were students on the train. What does a Chinese student want to do more than anything else? Why, to talk English of course. I traded one English conversation for a seat and spent the night regretting the fact that I hadn't slept in the aisle (the seats were horribly uncomfortable). All in all I was not well rested when I arrived in Xi'an at 8am the next morning and tried to find my parents. . .
Advertisement
Tot: 0.086s; Tpl: 0.019s; cc: 8; qc: 23; dbt: 0.0293s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Dad
non-member comment
Correction No.1
"Family Photo" says it all. Fantastic time had by all. Yes the taxi was a rip off, but it was an AUDI. The leather seating, extra leg room (compared to a VW) and good aircon was very welcome after the heat at the Summer Palace. Yes we took the cable car to near the middle of the wall but that stilll left a considerable climb. Christine doesn't think it made the climb any easier{unfortunately}. All said and done it was a fantastic experience not to be missed, maybe Mao was right.