The Lazy Cherub Enigma: Great Wall, Datong and General Unrest

Sunday 3 August 2014

Great Wall, Datong and General Unrest

It’s official – we are now overlanding. First stop – The Great Wall. We rumbled our way out the city for a 4-hour drive to Jinshanling. This is the less “touristy” section of the wall that has no camel rides, street buskers or fake Ming Dynasty soldiers. What Jinshanling does have is a cable car that takes you to the top of the mountain where the wall begins. On a cooler day hiking up is an option but we decided to cable car up and hike down since by then it would be early evening and much less likely to have one of us drop dead from heat exhaustion. The cable car was not what we expected. We thought it would be a large car that takes 20 or 30 people at a time and 10 minutes to get to the top. Instead it was a barely two person car encased in clear plastic (Zero ventilation) that took 25 minutes to get to the top. If you’ve ever wanted to experience what it is like to be a baby or a dog locked in a hot car then take this ride up. You won’t be disappointed.

Once up there the wall is truly a site to behold. It goes on forever on both sides. You can’t even begin to imagine the manpower and skill it took to build. We hiked for about 5 km and rarely saw anyone. We even celebrated one of the group member’s birthday complete with cake on top one of the old guard towers. We spent the night here and had the place entirely to ourselves . Well almost to ourselves. When were having dinner alone in the massive dinning room there suddenly appeared out of no where huge groups of Chinese men smoking, talking extremely loudly and taking up all the tables around us. They ordered massive amounts of food and beer and filled the place with cigarette smoke and constant yelling. I am learning that dinner is never complete until you have an asthma attack from second hand smoke and a migraine from all the yelling.

The next day we drove to Datong. The city itself is unremarkable. Its predominant industry is coal so everything is grey and depressing. It is a strange mix of old and new. There is a “walled” section of the city that is full of old hutongs that are interesting to wander. Sadly, the new city has taken to tearing these all down to rebuild them again as a tourist site. The “new old town” looks nice but of course, no one lives there – it’s for show. However, the big tourist draw here are the Yungang Grottos – a series of caves with effigies of Buddha carved into them.

After the grottos the Good Doctor and I wandered what was left of the old city. It’s amazing the life that goes on in the narrow alleys of the hutongs. Everything is there – hair salon, take out food, bicycle repair shop, dog meat butcher. So if you want a hair cut and some minced dog for spaghetti later on its all here.

That night we had a group dinner at a street restaurant that specializes in leg of lamb on hot coals served at your table (we are assuming it was lamb…). We sat at the “vegetarian table” with Sarah (birthday girl) and her partner Wendy because for one thing, having a giant leg of lamb with a bucket of hot coals in your face is about the worst thing to have when it is 400 degrees out. The lamb table coped by drinking kegs of Chinese beer and by the end of it it showed. Keith became convinced that an elderly man on a bicycle with speaker box was walking up and down the street blasting “Giddy Up My Bear.” That and the fact that Keith gets cruised ALL THE TIME when we are out at night has made things pretty interesting. (BTW, we never did find out what the old man on the bike was advertising. All we know is periodically a man would approach him, they would disappear behind a parked car and then both would emerge very happy.)

(Side note: You have all heard about the earth quake and the riots/killings in the North. We are safe from the earth quake. It happened in the southern regions. However, the riots are in an area we will need to pass through in 3 weeks. Keep your fingers crossed. Otherwise it is a very L-O-N-G way around to get home. But then, we do have Richard, international man of mystery on the trip and he did say he knows of some safe houses...)