If You Build It, They Will Come

So here I am in China for a semester.  A friend and I had the foolish belief that maybe we could pick up one of the more complicated languages of the world in a matter of months.  Two stamped visas and more money than I’d like to admit later, and we were there in the thick of it – walking the streets of Chengdu, Shanghai, and Beijing; staring and being stared at; dodging the defecating 3 year-olds only to get hit by a careening taxi or bike.  The language revealed itself to be more of a challenge than Rosetta Stone and it’s respective salesmen might have let on.  Amidst our dismayed attempts at acquiring the Mandarin dialect, we recalled that we were, in fact, in China.  For the less informed among us, China is home to a variety of foods – most of which you don’t want to eat, and the rest you definitely ought not to – as well as attractions such as the Forbidden City, the Three Gorges Dam and of course the Great Wall.  

           

So in our attempts to fully utilize our visa and pricey plane ticket, Spencer and I recently found ourselves busing to the outskirts of Beijing where we might see the Great Wall.  The guidebook seemed to skimp out on the details of how exactly to get there and as we soon found out - for good reason.  Our bus stopped 45 minutes into the trip where a strange man boarded the bus, shouting “Huairo! Huairo!” as many times as the driver would allow.  Spencer and I looked to each other, noticing that Huairo was the name of the city where we were to get off.  But it couldn’t possibly be our stop as the bus ride was supposed to take two hours before we arrived.  After much convincing with unintelligible mutters and grunts, in addition to the glares from our Chinese bus-mates for dillydallying, we made our exit onto a glorified patch of dirt where three men lay in waiting.  An old man with a camera had followed us – a fellow tourist.

           

The next twenty minutes were cold and complicated.  The men were trying to explain to us that to get to the Great Wall, they were our only means of transportation.  Between their broken English, and our comparatively decrepit Chinese, we managed to understand that this was a black taxi and that we practically had to take them up on their deal lest we be cast astray into a backwoods hamlet in northern China.  The service was agreed upon, and after debating the fare, we got into the car along with the tourist and one of the Chinese drivers.  To assure us of his legitimacy as a cab driver, he flexed his coat, as if we could read what it said, or be convinced by it’s authenticity.  The next hour of driving was awkward and at all times, uncomfortably fast.  The streets were winding and sloped up the sides of mountains; iced in most places. But our driver was true to his coat – he was always in control and knew when to go fast and when to go exceedingly fast.

           

Horseshoes and hand grenades (and English)

During the trip, we began to chat with our fellow tourist who apparently also spoke broken English.  He was from the Czech Republic and had two grandchildren.  We asked him what brought him to China and he in turn answered proudly, that his camera was 15 years old.  The car stopped in an even less inhabited village.  The Czech, my friend and I exchanged looks as if we were each an animal, so accepting of our demise that we awaited it almost eagerly.  We waited for him to pull out the handgun with the slender silencer we saw in movies.  After nothing happened, I cautiously asked the driver where we were going next.  Spencer conveniently recalled the 40-minute hike up to the wall that the book had spoken of and the driver pointed to a path impatiently.  We were not going to die.  I pointed to the sign above it which read in big letters, “WALL CLOSEO FOR RECONSTRUCTION.”  We were not going to die yet.  The driver shook his head with confidence, which incidentally looks the same in all languages.  

           

120 RMB later and we were on our way.  The trip up the mountain was fairly uneventful.  The Czech twice offered to take my bag whenever I was lagging behind.  I declined.  We found the Wall.  This was my only experience with the Great Wall but I expect that were I to go to a non-prohibited portion of it, there might be some sort of ramp or ladder for ascending it.  Our method of getting atop it consisted of climbing over the collapsed portions of it, testing rocks and bricks for security in their placement.  Occasionally I would find a lighter brick and throw it off to the side so as to later be able to brag that I had helped destroy something as mighty as the Great Wall of China. 

The Czech leaving me in his dust

Otherwise, it was pretty much that: a wall and a great one at that.  Interestingly enough, we had two options once we were on it – left and right.  Left was slightly dangerous but was a decline so it would start at a nice easy pace.  Right was downright perilous – an eroded stone ladder of sorts that quickly shifted from a sharp incline to a 90 degree, vertical climb.  Once I was outvoted, we proceeded right.  Most intimidated and subsequently complaint-inclined, I went last.  Hand over hand and leg over leg, I slowly made progress.  Spencer, at the front of the group, shouted words of encouragement and I reciprocated equally choice words back at him.  The Czech again offered to take my bag – that son of a Czech.

We arrived at the top of some evidently God-forsaken tower of old where soldiers might have teetered between life and death at the hands of invading armies from the north.  We commemorated it with granola and knock-off Pringles.   Deeming the climb back down too dangerous, all three of us agreed that the only option was to continue forward.  The next climb up was similar except instead of protruding bricks, it had sharp, jagged rocks, like small, untrustworthy daggers, hungry for your hand.  On this second summit, my friend asked if I suffered from acrophobia - a fear of heights.  I answered no, I subscribe instead to a very rational fear of heights – the fear that falling from them means I will painfully die.  A fear of stickers is irrational, a fear of pickles is equally absurd – but a fear of heights?  That is incredibly rational, more so than a lack of a fear of heights.  Rather, I told him, I have a fear of people who irrationally lack a fear of heights.

The next leg of our journey was more of a descent.  Going up is always the hardest part until you realize you have to go down.  Going up means you can’t look down, lest you become scared.  Going down lacks such niceties – you are required to look down to find your footing.  But becoming scared on the way down means one of two things: you fall off – either to your death or safely and painfully onto your back – or you tense up.  Tensing up is the worst, because then the fear compounds with time.  However undesirable the end result might be, falling down is still tempting in its degree to which you find yourself committed – you make one a quick decision and gravity takes care of the rest.  The simple solution is to fail to look down.  When it comes to finding your footing, you hope for the best and in the end, I continued in the monotony of descent in such a manner that would make Finding Nemo’s Dory beam.  

In addition to the adrenaline rush I was to receive should I drop a thousand feet or more – time enough for several lives to flash before my eyes, let alone my own – I had been operating on a time limit.  The three of us were to meet our driver at the base of the mountain where he allegedly would return at 2:30.  As the cowardly lion of our ridiculous trio, I was the last to clamber down and despite their best attempts to throw supportive lines of encouragement my way, it was vastly too far down for the words to hold meaning.  My foot slipped and the first identifiable word in ages was a curse from Spencer who would have to drag my mangled corpse back to America.  And Customs frowns upon cadaver-related contraband.

Spencer wasn’t about to do that.  There would be too much explaining to do in a language he didn’t know well enough.  And since he didn’t know my PIN number, even if he could recover my ATM card, he would still have to pay for my travel-related expenses himself.  He could only get reimbursed upon finally delivering my – by then – rigor mortis-ridden body back to my parents.  And asking someone for a reimbursement check for various travel-related expenses of their deceased loved one during the mourning period is untimely at best, and insensitive at worst.  No, I couldn’t do that to him – too much pressure.  And besides, what about the Czech?  People die in random climbing accidents all the time; but in China, on a forbidden section of the Great Wall, with a Czech you’ve known for three hours?  No, nobody does that, and I wasn’t about to be the first.   

I’d like to think it was adrenaline that got me down the Great Wall that day.  It’d be even cooler to think it was a random surge of divine strength or a joule of energy I’d been saving for a rainy day.  But to say that, would be kidding myself – I just wasn’t about to let that Czech’s grandkids ask him about that stupid American he saw fall off the Wall.