Today we went to the Great Wall of
China.
Hoping to avoid the crowds (a bit) we opted for an early
departure to a more remote location. Now we've all been reading
about the Great Wall our whole lives, so expectations were pretty
high. Now I've been many places and seen many beautiful things;
Yosemite, Angkor Wat, Grand Teton National Park... I have to say this
thing still has the power to impress.
It was drizzly when we got there, and
after a 20 minute hike up a steep hill we were on the wall – alone.
Whether the hour or the weather the wall was empty but for the five
of us that shared the minivan from our hostel. Susan and I headed
off along the wall in the opposite of the prevailing direction and
were rewarded with an hour at least of nothing but the view and the
ancient earthworks.
The wall winds along an impossibly
steep ridge. While restored, the original was built in the Ming
dynasty, which means these stones were carried and placed using human
power exclusively. Every two hundred meters or so there is a guard
tower, and any single stretch of this would be impressive. In places
the wall itself is like a staircase, and so steep you are using your
hands to help. But once you get to a decent vista you see how it
winds along this ridge, then to the top of the mountain, then off
again to the right and left and across the valley and along a ridge
there so steep that it couldn't possibly be restored without
grotesque loss of life, even today...
The view in both directions is
spectacular, and the clouds and mist today have the ridgelines
playing hide and seek. It's easy now to recognize the inspiration
behind the classic Chinese paintings with their brilliant use of
whitespace and grays to imply a vast landscape.
But the weather turns more and more
foul. Pretty soon my hands are aching and cramping from the cold.
The camera gave up the ghost as well, in the rain and cold. The
crowds are accumulating now and we're waiting at times to squeeze
through the narrow guard doors. I'm thinking less about the poor
bastards who had to build this thing and more about the poor bastards
who would have been stationed out here for god only knows how long
with no hope of a warm shower at the other end of their shift.
Finally, we find our way to the cable car/gondola opting for a ride
back down rather than a hike in the downpour.
We warm up over a cuppa, but first have
to pass the gauntlet of vendors selling tourist crap. There are
probably fifty stalls set up along the walk from the gondola and the
parking lot, and every single one is selling the same crap the same
way. I mean literally, they all have the same T-shirts, the same
little red book, and the same line “I remember you! Buy T-shirt!”
Once refueled by some tea my brain starts to work on this. What
prevents these folks from recognizing the competitive advantage of
differentiation? Why would they all be the same? So stupid! But of
course these aren't small business owners, their government
employees. The shop and supplies assigned to them, and while the may
get a little something extra on top of their stipend when they
successfully overcharge the big dumb tourists, they aren't really
free to differentiate.
There is a second big mystery to me
about Chinese business methods; the “tout”. Now you have these
all over Asia, folks whose job it is to bring business in off the
street (by any means necessary). In most cases this is just a person
out in front yelling out to you “Hello mister! Water!” or “Nice
Bar, roofdeck” or “Tshirts”. Occasionally these methods are
more nefarious, and include some scams of “my school has an art
exhibition” or “I want to practice English, you want to have
tea?”, but the most common is the hard sell. But for me, and I
imagine many western travellers, the hard sell makes us less inclined
to shop, eat or drink there. You can't show the least inclination
towards something, no matter how thirsty you are, because once you
appear to be a real prospect you are beset upon like a injured lamb
surrounded by ravenous dogs. The trick is to look bored,
uninterested to actively say no, geturing no with your hands ... and
then suddenly jumping into one shop (usually the one with the least
aggressive tout). But the mystery is... they still push the hard
sell.
Before leaving to return to Beijing we
had a very nice Chinese food lunch in a restaurant that also, had to
be government owned. We were the only people there on a weekend day
during high season. But there were at least four employees, the
place was immaculate, and the five of us were served 10 dishes and
tea and turned down the beer (too cold) and soup (too full), all for
a song. Very weird.
