the Great Wall at Mutianyu

Thank God for Czechs.

That might seem a bit strange to read at the beginning of a post about the

GREAT WALL OF CHINA,

but I assure you it's most apropos. You'll see. Without the heroic efforts of some Czech tourists we met, we might never have gotten here:

We got up early on the morning of Friday the 20th of September. It was our last full day in Beijing, and we had but one thing on our to-do list.

Okay, two things. The first was room service. Since Miss H and I were no longer strangers to business-class flying, it only made sense to up the ante and order some of this buttery goodness:

Rice Krispies, milk, orange juice, yogurt, fresh fruit, coffee, cream, sugar, toast, muffins, Danishes, butter, jam, salad, eggs, and sausage. If that doesn't fuel you up to the Great Wall and back, I don't know what will.

The problem was getting to where we needed to be to get there. We had two lines on buses and neither of them were very precise. There were vague rumors of a bus leaving from somewhere in the vicinity of the long-distance bus terminal; but we didn't even know the name of the terminal. That's how fuzzy our intelligence was. Miss J's diligently-found directions were the most specific she could find: head past the bus terminal, turn left, and the bus station for the mountain village of Mutianyu (the jumping-off point for the least touristy section of the Great Wall) would appear on our left.

We climbed groggily out of Dongzhimen Station, the sun in our eyes. We wandered around, in, and out of the bus terminal, but saw nothing that looked remotely like what we were after. It was at this moment that I, stepping off the curb to peruse bus numbers, bumped into a group of four foreigners, three long-haired women and a stocky man. All of them were rather comely-looking. They immediately inquired, in accented but articulate English, if I was trying to get to the Great Wall. I assented. We were seeking different bus numbers but it soon became apparent that we sought the same terminal. After a moment's more waffling, I took the bull by the horns and made inquiries at a snack shop whose owner had beckoned to me eagerly some minutes before. (It seemed that he pointed wayward travelers in the right direction often.) He scribbled a crude map and a bus number on a scrap of paper and pointed the way: further down the road and left. We embarked in a hurry—it was 9:25 and we had only five minutes to catch the dang thing.

We missed it.

We got about halfway down the road to the as-yet-invisible terminal when the green bus of our dreams pulled onto the road and swung by us, our shattered hopes wafting along behind it like windblown newspapers.

Yet all was not lost. Miss J had a Plan B: bus No. 916, departing every half-hour for the wall. There was a question of whether there would be any departures after 9:30. After a bit of a powwow the Czechs and we decided to try for it. We walked all the way back to the bus terminal we'd explored earlier, entered its urine-soaked depths, and joined the massive line for the 916—which, fortunately, did leave after 9:30, every five minutes or so. It turned out that it didn't go all the way to Mutianyu, but it would dump us off close enough to go the rest of the way by private car or taxi.

The Chinese take a piratical view of commerce. Anything goes. There are no holds barred. Only the half-whispered tales I've heard of Morocco meet or exceed China's notion of free enterprise. I witnessed it firsthand at Donghuamen Night Market, and it was no less the case here in the shadow of the Great Wall. Competition among private car-drivers for potential customers is fierce, constant, and underhanded.

I got an inkling of this when the bus stopped some miles from the distant mountains (upon which the ruins of the Great Wall were not yet visible) and two men in polo shirts pulled the seven of us off the bus. The leader was a rotund, middle-aged man in stained jeans, who possessed a suspiciously long fingernail on his pinkie. His assistant was younger and much bonier, and didn't talk much. They had two cars and they said they'd take us to the wall for some unholy amount. Once I realized that they'd yanked us off the bus merely to fleece us, Miss H's Irish temper began to rise, and even my Norwegian good cheer began to desert me.

That's where the Czechs came in. The very essence of cool austerity, the spokeswoman of the group (tall and lean with walnut hair) folded her arms, leaned casually against a bus stop stanchion, and refused to budge. In vain did the Chinese ride-broker wheedle, cajole, and threaten. The Czech woman was an impregnable fortress of thriftiness. She named a price of 25 yuan (just over four dollars) a head, non-negotiable. The Chinese man came down. The Czech girl didn't move. The Chinese man came down a little more. The Czech girl refused. Finally, deflated, the Chinese man agreed to the price and gestured us into the cars. The Czechs went with the head honcho, and Miss J, Miss H and I went with the younger man. He drove sanely, and hardly touched the horn at all, but his taste in music was...deplorable. For the entirety of the 40-minute ride, we were bombarded with the most inane English pop tunes imaginable. I felt like gouging my ears out after only a few miles. How I made it through that hellish ride, hearing Ricky Martin's "Livin' La Vida Loca" over and over while sitting in the traffic jam just below the village, is beyond me. But at last we were there.
The place was awash with people: tourists trying to get tickets up to the wall from a sizable booth, and vendors hawking everything from fresh fruit to overpriced souvenirs. And man, that driver with the coke nail was pushy. He kept hanging around, trying to secure our tickets for us, even after we made it quite clear we wanted to do it ourselves. Finally, with his unwanted aid and a few brusque words from the sourpuss ticket agent, I had three tickets for the ropeway, the wall, and the toboggan down. (I'll get to that in a minute.)

We climbed a few more steps to the ropeway entrance and bid farewell to the Czechs: unlike us, they hadn't purchased snacks beforehand. We saw them later on the wall proper, but after that we never crossed paths again. We never did thank them for the splendid negotiating job they did. 

Miss H, Miss J and I stood in line for the ski lift, twiddling our thumbs and exchanging idle talk, mostly concerning the people nearby. The ride up was scenic and thrilling, like the ride into Seoul Zoo, but much loftier.

And then...we were on the Wall.

There remains little to tell. We hiked around, up and down the treacherous staircases and ramps, marveling at this wonder of ancient engineering and surmising how the enemies of the Emperor (no matter how formidable) must have reacted when they gazed upon this stalwart redoubt.

Feast your eyes:

Then we skidded down the side of the mountain on toboggans. These are little plastic carts with casters, which superficially resemble mechanic's creepers, but possess a conspicuous handbrake. You ride down a polished aluminum track, braking on the curves and letting the wind through your hair on the straightaways. At one point there was even a hair-raising ride across a wooden-slat bridge over a sheer drop of several hundred feet. The ride down took barely five minutes. It was worth every last yuan.

Then we climbed into the car with our dear driver friend (who'd waited for us) and did the whole thing in reverse.

We ventured out from our hotel later that night in search of zha jiang mian, the half-mythical predecessor to Korean jjajjangmyeon, but we wound up eating at Pizza Hut instead. Fortunes of war.

And that's basically it. We got up the next day, took a sane, relatively inexpensive cab ride to the Beijing Airport, and checked out of China. We were home and dry in Seoul by 1:00 p.m. on Saturday the 21st.

Mission(s) accomplished.