One man went to Mao
With the Olympics set to boost tourism to unprecedented levels, how
easy is it to negotiate this vast country without a guide and using
local trans****t? John O'Mahony finds out.
Follow his journey on video
" John O'Mahony
" The Guardian,
" Saturday February 2 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2008/feb/02/china.asia
This article appeared in the Guardian on Saturday February 02 2008 on
p2 of the Travel features section. It was last updated at 00:02 on
February 02 2008.
Precipice prayers ... The Hanging Temple in Datong. Photograph: John
O'Mahony
If there had been a scam sub-plot in the movie House of Flying
Daggers, it couldn't have been more exquisitely choreographed than the
one we fell for. Here's how the swindle unfolded. Asking directions
just off Tiananmen Square on our first evening in Beijing, my wife and
I were approached by two Chinese "students" who offered to take us on
a tour of the hutong, the labyrinth of medieval back streets that
encircle the city.
Along the way, a dainty traditional teahouse materialised out of the
darkness, complete with carved wooden booths and walls decked with
scroll paintings of mountains and dragons. There was even a monk in
the corner, intently practising his calligraphy.
On cue, a beautiful young waitress - whose name, we were told, was
Fairy-Angel! - wafted in and announced that a tea ceremony was about
to begin. She produced a tray of different teas and served up some
delectable numerology: seven for friend****p, eight for wealth and - my
choice - nine for long life.
She then brewed up each tea in a glass pot before serving them in
thimble-sized cups. All had restorative properties and were
accompanied by intricate tales involving the tea-loving Emperor
Qianlong, who frequented Beijing's teahouses in disguise, causing his
entourage to kowtow in code using their fingers on the table-top.
But most captivating aspect was the teas themselves; the most
delicious little cuppas I'd ever tasted. One was brewed not from
leaves but from what looked like fine aromatic gravel and tasted like
sweet, sooty ginger. Another fluttered magically in the pot and was
phenomenally bitter and bracing. Soon, our booth had descended into an
orgy of titanic tea-tasting. And then it came, like a grenade lobbed
into the festivities: the wallet-busting bill, the Yuan equivalent of
an eye-popping £200.
Even after an extended bout of haggling, the amount was still enough
to cover a year's supply of tea anywhere in the world. But once the
shock had subsided, we couldn't help feeling strangely elated. As our
first big test, the tea ceremony couldn't have been a more a
staggering illustration of the whole purpose of our mission in China.
Our brief for the trip was disarmingly simple. Received wisdom
dictates that China should only be tackled in the regimented ranks of
a hermetically sealed, full-service tour. The Chinese Embassy
reinforces this by tying up independent travellers in visa red tape.
However, our long-held dream of travelling through this vast country
didn't featured being bused around, plugged into each sanitised sight,
shackled to a claustrophobic band of foreigners. We were determined to
make our own sweet, unchaperoned way across the entire length of
China, using only local trans****t, from Beijing to the Terracotta Army
in Xian, from the inhospitable deserts of the northwest to the holy
mountain of Emei Shan and along the Yangtze before crossing the finish
line in Hong Kong.
Everyone - particularly those who had found five-star tours gruelling
- told us that the idea was sheer lunacy. Many hotels are still not
authorised to accept foreigners. Train tickets are snapped up faster
than a Led Zeppelin reunion concert. China veterans warned of
everything from being gawked at like pop stars to spitting in public
to partition-less toilets that allow users to "squat and chat".
After our tea ceremony misadventure, we wondered if the doom-mongers
had a point. But, next morning, we dusted ourselves down and headed
back out into the field.
We kicked off with the exhilarating expanse of Tiananmen Square and
marvelled at its inhuman scale, borne down on one side by the
gargantuan, colonnaded Great Hall of the People and on the other by
the embalmed spectacle of Mao in his glittering crystal coffin. We
then plunged fearlessly into the Imperial splendour of the Forbidden
City, the epitome of Ming dynasty China with its sweeping courtyards,
blood-red walls and palaces, and clusters of yellow-tiled roofs, their
curly upturned eaves breaking against the blue sky like golden waves.
All around, sullen tour groups were herded along by Chinese guides
yelling through miniature megaphones. By comparison, we spent hours
ambling through the Imperial Gardens and dawdling by the Hall of
Supreme Harmony, soaking up the peace and serenity.
On our second day, we headed off with breathless anticipation for the
most formidable obstacle on our Chinese assault course: the Great
Wall. Once we'd scrummed our way past the souvenir sellers, we were
amazed to find the wall itself practically deserted. We spent a
sublime afternoon, hiking along the ramparts and watchtowers,
witnessing the world's greatest structure unfurl before us like a
gigantic stone ribbon, fluttering all the way to the distant, hazy
grey mountain tops.
After another day spent scooting through Beijing on rented bikes,
taking in every pagoda and bell tower, we reckoned we were doing
relatively well. But we still had to face our first real test of
independent locomotion: the night train to Datong, just over 300km
west. In the station concourse, crowds of Chinese huddled round to
watch us perform such astoni****ng feats as buying water for the
journey and using a payphone. Our "hard sleeper" carriage turned out
to be a dorm on rails. It wasn't the most comfortable ride, but it
fizzed with bleak communist-era romanticism.
Datong served up two of China's lesser-known treasures: the Yungang
caves, where gigantic, 17m droopy-lobed Buddhas peer serenely through
huge holes punched in the rock-face; and the Hanging Temple, a
precarious wooden network of walkways and altars clinging lichen-like
half way up a terrifying sheer cliff. That evening, we toasted our
open-road brief with Chinese beer and a feast of spicy donkey,
Datong's culinary speciality (think Spam, but more gristly).
We ended Phase I of our trip with another of China's stellar
attractions: the Terracotta Warriors in Xian. The radiance of the
figures - created to guard the tomb of first emperor Qin **** Huang in
the third century BC and only discovered in 1974 by peasants sinking a
well - was among our main motivations for visiting China. Despite
being incarcerated in a phenomenally ugly concrete hangar, they didn't
disappoint - over 8,000 foot soldiers, cavalry and generals, all
modelled on real members of Qin's army, marching sombrely out of the
ferrous earth.
By now, we'd cut our teeth on China's major sights, and were beginning
to enjoy the white-knuckle ride. Difficulties persisted: the Datong
donkey triggered days of intestinal grief, complicated by the
open-plan loos; and nothing could prepare for the symphonic levels of
hawking and spitting. Also, none of the hotels I'd reserved from the
UK had actually recorded our booking when we arrived. But we'd managed
so far to avoid camping in a Chinese alleyway and were reli****ng the
prospect of moving up a gear in Phase II, a detour that few organised
tours would ever consider. We were heading out to China's arid
extremity in the far northwest: the Uighur autonomous region of
Xinjiang.
As we flew into the regional capital of Urumqi, China seemed to
undergo a jolting transformation; the terraced rice fields eva****ated
into a blinding infinity of flat, featureless desert. Swarthy Uighurs,
a rebellious Turkic people, supplanted the Han Chinese.
After catching our breath overnight in the oasis town of Turpan, we
hired a car and weaved out along a lonely highway through the sands as
far as the ancient ruins of Jiaohe, a thriving market city on the Silk
Road until it was sacked by the Mongols in the 13th century. Today,
it's an earthen skeleton half-submerged in the dunes.
We moved on, swerving through the fiery peaks of Flaming Mountain,
mythical inferno-red ridges rising out of the blanched sand.
Eventually, we reached the even more remote ghost city of Gaochang,
and took a juddery ride by mule to its furthest point; here the
fortifications are now just faint silty indentations.
We might have left it at that, but we had heard that it was possible
to continue beyond the sanctuary of the oasis belt and right out into
the Taklamakan desert - a quarter of a million square kilometres of
wasteland whose name translates as: "enter and you will never leave!"
We asked our driver to continue, arriving in pitch dark at our
stopover, an Uighur guesthouse decked with sumptuous tapestries. With
a band of Chinese adventurers also staying at the inn, we rose at 5am
and tramped out over the dark freezing dunes. Each was taller than the
last, and for a time, we feared that we were going to miss the moment
of sunrise. We finally clawed to the top of a mountain of sand shortly
before the sun peeked over the horizon and the entire expanse of
Taklamakan was lit up in an intense burst of incandescent orange. We
all sat transfixed. It was one of those transcendent moments that
burns into the memory and lingers for a lifetime.
We could have stayed weeks longer in Xinjiang and only reluctantly
returned to central China, flying back to Chengdu in the Sichuan
heartlands, before busing it south for the pilgrimage up the holy
Buddhist peak of Emei Shan. Strewn with over 20 active Buddhist
monasteries and furrowed by hundreds of kilometres of precipitous
stone stairways, it's one of the China's great devotional wonders.
Sitting on the fence ... a resident of the holy mountain of Emei Shan
In preparation for the climb, we took a room in the magnificent
16th-century Baoguo monastery at the foot of the mountain, a complex
of fluttering rooftops, shadowy courtyards and gleaming golden
shrines, all lit by banks of prayer candles and shrouded in thick
incense. We were woken at 4.30am by the gentle incantation of the
monks, and after a breakfast of rice ****ridge, we set off. It was
relatively gentle at first, but soon the pathways soared upwards. To
make matters worse, we were periodically attacked by bands of
aggressive monkeys snatching at our packs with teeth bared. Our reward
came at the monastery pit-stops when the cedar forests drew aside to
reveal the most ravi****ng mountain vista, peaks bucking and rearing
into the distance.
Near the top, the oxygen thinned, making the last sections a
breathless ordeal. A descending mist stole away the view but gave the
Golden Summit a giddy sense of mystery. The giant 30 metre elephant
that sits at the top seemed like a gilded spirit etched into the fog.
The heady mix of oxygen deprivation and the immense sense of
achievement brought tears to our eyes.
By now, we had almost forgotten about the independent travel
challenge. The tea ceremony was a distant memory, and the desert and
Emei Shan had been triumphs. We were convinced that the notion that
China couldn't be travelled independently was a myth.
But that was all about to change.
To begin with, the bus to our next destination, to the Yangtze river
****t of Chongqing, was a shuddering boneshaker, hurling us around like
a cruel fairground ride. A Chinese family boarded carrying sackfuls of
live chickens, their scrawny necks protruding, and for the eight-hour
journey, we endured clucking, dropping and malicious pecking.
Our ferry - the Long Moon - turned out to be a rusty old junk with
"first class" berths boasting only two bare beds and a pungent squat
toilet. On the first night, I was awoken by a gangly silhouette
creeping through the window. I sprung up and for a moment was staring
into startled eyes just inches from my own. He instantly disappeared,
cart-wheeling back out through the window, then acrobatically
back-flipping up the side of the boat before vani****ng through a
window in the upper decks. I stood guard for the rest of the night,
brandi****ng my camera tripod and watching the figure scuttle up and
down the side of the boat, diving into other cabins before flitting
away, a limber outline in the light of the moon.
When the sun came up, we'd finally hit the Three Gorges, slices of
bare rock soaring up on each side of the river. They were
astoni****ngly beautiful, but we were now unnerved and jittery. We
tried to regain momentum at our final stopover, a nature reserve
called Jiangjaijie, recommended ecstatically by every Chinese we'd
met, with shard-like karst rock formations soaring thousands of feet
in the air. But it turned out to be as crowded as the Beijing metro,
so we fled after just one day. As we finally crossed the frontier to
Hong Kong, the yelling, tooting and mayhem all ebbed away, and we
realised that we were experiencing something we'd almost forgotten
existed in the previous month: relaxation.
So, for the final verdict: can China be successfully travelled outside
the confines of a tour? Well, on a very basic level, we'd proved that
it can be done. But the journey was enormously taxing and, at times,
downright dangerous. Sometimes we felt we were viewed merely as
curiosities or prey.
But even taking into account the hairiest moments, our experiences in
the Taklamakan desert and on Emei Shan - and our encounters on ferries
and in tea-houses - are likely to stay with us forever. Ultimately, if
you're looking for a hassle-free, chill-out holiday, then China may
not be the best choice - regardless of whether you take a tour or not.
But if you're ready for a wild, stimulating adventure that will bring
you into contact with the unreconstructed lawlessness of China, in all
its horn-tooting, phlegm-hacking, scintillating reality, then taking
on this unruly country independently is the only way to go.
Way to go
Getting there
Until March 31, STA (0870 230 8512, statravel.co.uk) has
Heathrow-Beijing flights on KLM from £432pp rtn. It can also book rail
tickets in advance; from £129pp for Beijing-Xian-Shanghai.
china-train-ticket.com can book tickets online and deliver them to
your hotel.
Where to stay
Beijing: Bamboo Garden Hotel, Beijing. (No 24, Xiao****qiao, Jiugulou
Street, Xicheng District, +10 5852 0088). Datong: Datong Garden Hotel
(59 Danan Street, +35 2586 5888). Xian: Hotel Royal Garden (334 Dong
Da Street, Bei Lin District, +29 8723 5311). Turpan (Jiaohe): The
Turpan Oasis Hotel (41 Qin Nian Road, +99 5855 3158). Emei: Baoguo
monastery (+137 0813 1210, patrickyanglong@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
). Hong Kong:
Eaton Hotel (380 Nathan Road, Kowloon, 00852 2782 1818).
Further information
China National Tourist Office: 020-7373 0888, cnto.org. Visa
information: chinese-embassy.org.uk.
Country code 0086.
£1= 13.60 yuan.
Flight time London to Beijing via Amsterdam or Paris: 11¾ to 14½ hrs.
|
