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| Just try and get through now, Mongolians. |
“People everywhere,
heads on ‘em like mice.” I muttered to myself as I pushed against a thousand
Chinese tourists at a Beijing
bus station. Where I had heard that strange old expression and in what dank
corner of my brain it had been hiding I have no idea, but it was apt. It was
Mayday and it seemed that half the population of the biggest country on earth
were squeezing me slowly towards a row of articulated buses. I felt stared at,
claustrophobic and deeply uncomfortable. And I wasn’t even at the Great Wall
yet.
My time in China had
stretched and stretched again. In Shanghai,
lulled by a taste of domestic bliss and the comfort of a stable group of
friends, I had stayed longer than planned. I had extended my visa but that
extra month would be gone in a few days. I couldn’t extend again unless I got a
job, and honest work brings me out in hives. I had to leave. I wanted to go to Mongolia but,
true to form, I was cutting it fine to get my visa in time. On a cold Beijing morning at the
start of May, I strode through the Russian quarter where Chinese merchants
hailed me in Russian. “Nyet, comrade,” I replied in my best Bond-villain Russian.
I soon reached the embassy district where white seeds floated down like snow
and accumulated in drifts in the gutters. Behind them were high razor wire
fences. Every hundred meters a straight-backed guard stood in front of an
embassy gate. Cuba, Portugal, Vietnam,
Algeria,
the nameplates read. But all the guards were Chinese. Eventually I found the
Mongolian embassy visa section – a
little hut outside the wire with faded signs and one glass window which only
opened for a couple of hours a day.
I waited for an hour with a group of
Chinese businessmen and a young French couple and handed my photocopied,
half-filled-out visa application form to a bored young Mongolian who stamped it
without a glance and gave me a receipt and the address of a bank where I needed
to pay an $85 ‘rushed visa fee’. I sighed again at the nonsensical stupidity of
tourist visas and walked to the bank. I would get my visa a day before my
Chinese visa expired – it would be a close run thing. But before then I had
four days to kill. I’d better go to the Great Wall, and I knew the perfect day.
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| One of Beijing's surviving hutongs. |
China, in case you haven’t heard,
is big. And crowded. Really crowded. In the 6 weeks I had spent on China’s east
coast, I had felt continuously mobbed by teeming swarms of people. I grew up in
a town with more cows than people – even
some of the people were more cow than person – and big crowds have always
unnerved me. The sound of a hundred crossed conversations, the smell of a
thousand armpits, the feel of eyes constantly scanning and flitting across me,
the feeling of being trapped – it just freaks me out. And, maybe as an offshoot
of this, I don’t queue well. Ask me to line up for more than, say, 3 minutes,
and you’ll be treated to a particularly unattractive display of righteous
indignation and agitation, peppered with uncontrolled outbursts of swearing,
often resulting in new and interesting combinations. Once I accidentally said
titting wank-whore, which cheered me up a little. So, in the interests of
boredom and self-improvement, it was time for some exposure therapy – like the
arachnophobe who puts his hand in a jar of spiders, I was going to the Great
Wall of China on a public holiday.
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| Gulp. |
At the bus station ladies with high
visibility vests, whistles and walkie-talkies channeled hundreds of milling
tourists between steel handrails, gesturing and yelling at us to pack in tighter.
Half an hour later as I shuffled onto an idling bus, I was reminded of cattle
being prodded and cajoled into an abattoir. Happily the conductor was armed
with an electronic ticket machine rather than a high-powered stun gun and I
bought my ticket and pushed into a window seat. Outside the traffic was thick
and the smog thicker. We jerked and swerved onto the 4 lane ring road that had
been built where Beijing’s
ancient and imposing city wall once stood. For two hours we crept north, past
concrete buildings and concrete factories and though shallow valleys full of
boxy towns and rice paddies. On the hill tops stands of trees faded into the
brown haze. The valleys became narrower and the hills closer and the road
twisted though scraggily forest. I got my first look at the Wall next to a
crowded carpark where we stopped for ten minutes as dark-windowed tour
buses bulled into the flow of traffic.
Near Badaling, the most heavily
visited part of the Wall, our bus joined a procession of identical buses which
edged though a huge carpark nose to tail, each one stopping only long enough to
disgorge their cargo of giggling, chatting tourists. Once off my bus I looked
back and counted ten more buses before the road disappeared around a corner.
Each one held around a hundred people and a new bus offloaded every two
minutes. The broad street to the Wall was lined with souvenir stands, themed
restaurants and ATMs. It was all concrete made to look like stone and plastic
made to look like terracotta – like a grey, Chinese Disneyland.
At the top of the street the Wall
itself loomed and I was swept along in a crowd that bottle-necked at a gateway
through the pale stone. On the other side, hundreds of people mobbed the ticket
counter. As I pushed my way to the front, a fat man with a scowling baby face
pinned me hard against an iron railing and screamed a question at the ticket
seller. Surrounded by thick stone walls, my heart fluttered and I fought a deep
urge to punch the sweaty folds at the back of his neck.
On the far side of the metal
turnstile, the crowd spread out onto a viewing platform bordered by low
crenellations on three sides with the Wall proper at its back. I walked to the
edge and leaned into the void, peering down a long valley. I breathed deep,
enjoying the brief respite from the crush of flesh. To my right the Wall
zig-zagged and climbed steeply before turning at right angles, running along a
high ridge and dissolving into the brown smog haze behind me. It was amazing to
think that this wall, stretching 8000km from the ocean to the desert, had stood
for a thousand years, keeping Mongolian marauders at bay. Except that it didn’t
and hadn’t. The Great Wall is, in fact, a series of unconnected walls built
over centuries, often many miles apart. This part of the Wall, the one you see
in tourist brochures, was built in the 16th century and had been
extensively rebuilt in the 1950s. Most of the stone from the Wall was nicked
over centuries by locals who used it to built their houses which in turn were
bulldozed to build highways and factories. And anyway, the thing didn’t work.
Mongolians were always getting though, over or around it. Oh, and you can’t see
it from the moon. Sorry.
So what I was standing on was a copy
of a wall that, frankly, was never so great anyway, built around the time
my Granddad was building his bungalow in the Melbourne suburbs.
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| The Wall. |
Still, it was impressive. Twenty
meters high in places and ten meters thick at the base, it tapered to a paved
path broader than an English country lane fenced by low walls. Made from
massive blocks of irregular grey stone, it at least looked like it had stood
for a thousand years. Every few hundred meters the path ran through a square
tower peppered with archers’ slots. I rejoined the press of polyester t-shirts,
cameras and chatter climbing the steps to the top. There’s nothing
like an Asian country to make a man of 5’10” feel tall and I peered over an
unbroken river of heads which snaked up the hill and disappeared into the smog
half a mile away. I’m rubbish at judging crowd numbers but we were ten abreast
and hard against those in front and behind. There had to be 100,000 people. I shuffled along in the pack, fighting back low shivers of panic
and wondering how many legs I would break if I launched myself into the scrub
below. After I while I decided to enjoy it and abandon any idea of personal
space as I shamelessly held up traffic taking photos of the ghostly, grey-brown
landscape. By the time I got off the Wall three hours and two kilometres later,
I had a full SD card and an empty stomach so I ate at a traditional Chinese burger
joint and looked for a bus.
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| The crush for a berth on the last train to Beijing. |
The line for the buses made the
scrum on the Wall look like the mosh pit at an Enya concert. It was 400 meters
long, five people wide and grumpy. By my calculations it would take around a
decade to get to Beijing.
At Badaling train station a ticket seller waved me away and said something
which may have translated as, “Not likely, son.” I joined the crowd anyway and
darted inside just as a pair of guards closed the doors. An hour later I hid in
the middle of the queue as we shuffled past three overworked ticket inspectors
and flashed an old receipt I found in my wallet in place of a ticket. A couple
of hundred people filled the platform in the late afternoon gloom. I battled my
way onto the next train, mercilessly elbowing in front of children and grannies
and generally acting very Chinese. After 90 minutes wedged between a bicycle
and a toilet, I was back in Beijing.
By the time I got back to my hostel and fell into bed, I figured I had
given my fear of crowds and queuing a good licking. Although I am now terrified
of public holidays and tourist attractions. You win some, you lose some.
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