Sitting on Top of the World

China is seldom a boring place. One can always make a decision to stay in and watch movies, I guess, something I do do a fair bit, but as soon as you step out the door, something random and strange often happens. Take, for instance, last weekend.

I was woken rather too early Saturday morning by a call from some old family friends, who, after establishing that I didn’t have set plans for the day, said that I positively must go over to their restaurant for lunch, and then go out and play. This is the terminology. Qu qu war. Go on an outing might be a slightly more dignified translation, but it really comes down to the same thing. Groggily I agreed, and after a suitable increment, got on a bus and headed over to their restaurant, on the east third ring road. Lunch was good, if rather standard. There are about 6 dishes that are normal and tame, and these are eaten rather exclusively by most foreigners. That’s what we had. I’m hoping to branch out a bit, but every time I try, I get offered sheep feet or cow stomach, and extremities and innards aren’t really what I’m looking for. Still, it was good. Lamb, chicken, some green vegetables. Can’t complain certainly. That I was sat down with the daughter beforehand, and that it was suggested to get to know her better is basically part of the territory.

We started off on the adventure around two, and I promptly fell asleep because I was full of food, and because it usually makes car trips go faster. Though a trifle antisocial, I find it to be a pretty good policy. When I woke up, we were pulled off the road at an intersection, and the husband was galloping off to ask where we should go. We roared off down the littlest road, only slightly paved, and I wondered where we might be going.

It’s amazing how quickly China reverts 20 years or more. Just 45 minutes outside of Beijing, we were in the countryside and life looked a lot like I would imagine it has for the last 50 years or so. Maybe the people were less hungry, and maybe they had television in their low brick houses, but on the face of things, everything was the same. Men in work clothes squatted by the side of the road, sometimes working on army style jeeps and trucks, sometimes just starting out, watching the city cars drive by. Slowly the mountains got taller, until, quite suddenly, they were quite tall, all above 4000 feet certainly. The rivers cut narrow paths through them, and the road became a ledge, hacked into the rock. From time to time we would see an old temple in the distance somewhere, overgrown and sad looking. The houses turned from brick to stone, which made good sense considering much of Beijing’s slate comes out of these mountains.

We kept driving, and driving, and driving. The sound track was horrendous: 5 cds of Chinese pop that kept repeating. From Chinese Spice Girls to Chinese NSYNC. Absolutely egregious. We kept driving. We backtracked and tried another road. We went through the same town 5 times. We were lost. Finally, on our way home, our tail between our legs, we saw a sign that proved to be salvation…of a sort. 8 kilometers to Bai Cao Pan. That is what we’d been trying to find the whole time, maybe. 8 kilometers passed…then 16, then 24. We saw another sign for Bai Cao Pan. It, too, said 8km. We kept driving. By this time it was 7 or so, and we were winding up an especially tall mountain, passed huge trucks lining up to take coal into Beijing. We kept winding, and it got darker, until, maybe 45 minutes after the first sign, we got to a gate.

The gatekeeper lived in a small room behind the gate, and he was wearing his pajamas, watching the news. I guess his work day was pretty much over. We paid the entrance fee, and followed his directions, which were again, to keep going another 8 km up a dirt road. We saw not one wild rabbit but two, and I almost felt like I was back in Maine, except, of course, for the Chinese pop, which continued to blare from the speakers behind my head.

I might point out that by this point it was completely dark, and we certainly couldn’t see the view from the mountaintop. I did point this out actually, and the response was, oh, don’t worry, we’ll see it at sunrise. I had been Shanghaied. Beijinged. Whatever. They weren’t going to bring me home. Maybe they’re just joking I thought. They weren’t joking. You didn’t have anything to do tomorrow did you? The asked. We checked into the hotel at the top of the mountain, the highest point in the Beijing municipality. Standing 2173 meters, I was taller than Mount Washington, and checking in to a hotel.

My Chinese friends were kind of annoying. They’re not bad people. Just perpetual 12 year olds. I have no issue with twelve year olds who are twelve. I just don’t like it when they’re disguised as adults. As one who has tried fairly consistently to be older than I am for many years, I find the opposite somewhat trying of my patience. But they’re not bad people. And I tried to be friendly. They exclaimed how close the stars were, and this and that, and shouted off the top to see if there was an echo, heedless that people might be sleeping.

We went to the restaurant under the hotel, and there ordered far too much not very good food. It’s hard to find bad food in China, but they had, and they complained about it. The this was to that, the that too this. I was still full from lunch, but it was interesting to try the rabbit stew, something I’d never had before. It wasn’t particularly good, but might have had something to do with the restaurant. Following dinner and more remarking on the celestial proximity, we repaired for an early bed, which suited me fine.


Waking up at 4 though, did not. For starters, it was cold, and I had no socks. Why would I have needed socks for an afternoon’s outing? It was also dark. Very dark. One could even say it was darkest, being the time before dawn. I have written before about sunrises. I don’t like them. They are seldom dramatic, often cold, and usually not worth waking up for. I’ll go watch the sunset anytime, but the sunrise, I have always said, should be reserved for when one has been up all night anyway, hopefully in the company of a good friend. The sunrise was also at 6.

Still, we went out on the observation deck, and paced back and forth. And back and forth some more. Finally, towards 5:30 or so, other people started filtering out, our neighbors from the previous night. When the sun finally did rise, it was, actually, rather dramatic, maybe made more so by the two hours of waiting that had preceded it.

It meant that we could leave the observation deck for one thing. And it got warmer fast. We puttered around the mountain top until breakfast opened, and then, after slurping down the rice porridge (not rice pudding), and eating the steamed bread, pretty typical in the rather blah Chinese breakfast scene, we went off to find Bai Cao Pan.

I had thought we were already there, but no, it was apparently 5 km or so down the ridge, on a fairly decent path. I tightened my Birkenstocks, and off we went. Bai Cao Pan turned out to be an enormous alpine meadow, which, in the summer time, was said to be full of blooming wildflowers. Right then, it was mostly brown, but that didn’t stop the Chinese from running, frolicking, and yelling at each other from great distances. When I go hiking, mountaintops are sometimes the spot of a little frolicking, but they are never the location for yelling. Mountaintops are quiet. Hiking is quiet. In China, it’s not quiet. I lay down on the boardwalk and tried to tune them out.

The hike back took a bit longer, since it was mostly uphill. It wasn’t bad, but mom, by far the most annoying under normal conditions, had a hard time with it, and was pretty dramatic about it. You all go on, she said, just leave me here. This and more, including many small screams at trees that looked like animals or some such. It took a while, but we did make it back, settled with the hotel, and were on our way, heading home.

For another five hours. We went back a different way than we had come, started by an aborted attempt at a mountain shortcut. It would have worked, but Beijing had gotten heavy rains the previous week (the same snow that I got in Mongolia) and nobody had bothered to clean up, or even report the presence of rock slides that had taken out the road. Back, winding down the mountain we went.

Our path back to Beijing went south and then northeast, instead of just northeast, to get around some bumpy roads we’d been on the day before. It took us through a series of valleys, named, quite imaginatively, one through thirteen . They were carved by a wide river, and each time we crossed a bridge, we went down a number. There was an old temple that seemed the primary attraction in number ten, but numbers six and four were better known as the location of wedding photographs. Couples would pose standing in the shallow river, or next to the karst formation, as if they’d been married in somewhere far more romantic than the Chinese suburbs. The scenery, I’ll admit, was quite beautiful. It looked like Guilin, or, for that matter, highland Laos. Karst, or limestone, formations basically make up what we think of as Chinese landscape painting, those strangely shaped finger’s coming out of the mist. The thing is, it’s not really that stylized. That’s what they look like. So it was nice to drive through.

In number four we did like the locals and drove our car down into the river to wash it off, a highly random occurrence, but then again, with our track record it was hard to be surprised. I managed to not go horseback riding though, and, following our bout of car washing, we kept driving towards Beijing.

Beijing is both a city, and a municipality, which is to say that like Washington D.C, it exits without a state, doing it’s own thing. Taxation without representation. However, unlike D.C. the municipality is rather large. In all our driving we had not left it, though we had come close. It is in this manner that one can both be in the countryside and Beijing concurrently, and be driving toward Beijing at the same time.

The Chinese countryside, when it doesn’t not looking like photos from a history book, remains possibly the most consistently bizarre place I’ve ever been. As we drove, we passed enormous concrete African animals, an elephant and a giraffe, marking the entrance to some tourist park or other. A little down the way was a hideous building that looked like it had been modeled on Versailles by a blind architect. Later, we passed large lots full of seemingly random stones, which turned out to be on sale for people’s rock gardens. Most were larger than myself, and while I may not be a giant among men, I would imagine to rocks to have been rather heavy. We finally made it back around four, after another full run through of the CD collection, and I managed to talk my way out of dinner, returning home to recuperate.

Which, I guess, is a good place to stop for now. Cheers.