Beijing Revisited

It's a long flight to Asia from the eastern US, but you can choose to skip the flight and go directly to Beijing.

Prices below are in yuan -- slightly over 8 yuan to the dollar at the time.

Getting There, or Expect the Unexpected

I couldn't help comparing my preparations for this trip with those for my last long trip -- six weeks riding trains and thumbs around Portugal and Spain in 1970. Then I took one small duffel bag, one change of clothes (tie-dyed velvet jeans and a long white caftan, I believe) and a toothbrush. Not even a camera. While I was still traveling with very few clothes, I was a walking pharmacy and was carrying not one but two cameras. My luggage weighed in at Raleigh-Durham airport at 35 pounds -- could have been worse, but heavier than I had hoped. My luggage, ready to go

When I told my friends that my itinerary was subject to change, I hadn't meant on day one, but that's what happened. I had planned a last morning spent peacefully packing and pottering around. But after I checked the weather in China (very hot and dry in Turfan, hot and humid everywhere else), I checked the status of my flights only to find that Cathay Pacific had canceled the NY-Vancouver flight.

It took four phone calls to get me rebooked to Vancouver via Dallas on American. I wound up in first class -- either an apology from the very confused clerk on the last call, or because my One World Award was for business class. I had figured that the award (for RDU-Hong Kong and Chennai-RDU) was a bargain at 130,000 miles for business class. I knew for sure it was a bargain when I flew first class to Vancouver, and again at 5 a.m. EDT when I sank gratefully into an opulent window seat on the Hong Kong flight.

It got better -- the food was good, the service impeccable and the comfort noteworthy. And the route worked out well. The theory seems to be that you leave the west coast in the middle of the night, sleep your way round the Pacific Rim and across the International Date Line, and arrive in Hong Kong with the dawn. In my case the theory collided with the reality of a crying baby, but I still managed six hours sleep. Enjoying the journey as much as the destination can be tough on a long flight, but this time, drinking orange juice 39,000 feet above the South China Sea before breakfast, and an hour later, sipping cappuccino as the lights of the Taiwanese fishing fleet disappeared astern, it was easier.

Then Hong Kong's outlying islands emerged briefly from pink-tinged clouds, sprawled across a flat sea like a group of green dragons: I was back in Asia. Not that Hong Kong's new airport felt much like Asia, with its pancake-flat field, bare and cavernous terminal and Anglo-friendly signs. Facing a five hour layover I had a choice: I could have a shower ($9) and a two hour nap ($20), perhaps with a massage or a manicure. But that meant trekking to the outer reaches of the terminal, and I needed ten hours sleep, not two. Instead I joined the line at the transit desk and switched to an earlier flight, finally arriving in Beijing almost 36 hours after leaving home. So I actually flew only one of the four flights I had booked. I wondered what other changes lay ahead

Getting Around

My first trip to China, in 1997, was on a Smithsonian tour. It was luxurious (5-star hotels, planes and air-conditioned coaches), it was educational and I enjoyed it a lot, but I felt that I was in a cocoon. The Aussie tour company I used for the Silk Road leg of this trip, Intrepid, travels differently -- budget hotels, no planes, and no study leader. Far from expressing concern that you might want to go off on your own, the notice by the elevator in the Beijing hotel essentially said "get a map and get out there." And they recommend the metro -- when I suggested it to the Smithsonian tour manager, he reacted as if once I went underground I might never resurface.

My first afternoon in Beijing on that first trip, my roommate and I headed straight for the Yonghegong Temple (aka the Lama Temple) by taxi. My first afternoon this trip I went back, only this time I took the metro -- the Beijing train station stop was right round the corner from my hotel. Turned out, the metro was a breeze. It cost 3 yuan to anywhere from anywhere, so buying a ticket was no problem. With only two lines and two interchanges, and with maps on the platform and in the carriages, it was hard to get lost. I just needed to know the name of the next station in the direction I was going, so that I could get on the right train. The announcer on the train even gave the station names in English. But deciding which exit to go up was harder -- the tiny compass I was carrying came in handy.

I saw no other Westerners on the metro, and I was stared at some, but it was fast and dry and cheap, and great for people-watching. I noticed that boys expected to sit down even if their parents stood -- more evidence of the pampered generation? (Talking about being stared at -- I ate lunch in a very non-touristy place one day -- they had to find a dictionary so I could order. There was three-year old boy at the next table and his parents wanted to take a photo of him with me, but he obviously thought I was some kind of monster -- he wouldn't even look at me, never mind get close enough for a photo!)

Beijing felt different this time. Less of the overgrown village and more of the big city -- although it still didn't have the neon and bustle of Shanghai. Instead of a long trip in from the airport between whitewashed trees and fields, my taxi swept in on an expressway, at first between serried ranks of very dusty trees, but then between high-rise concrete apartment blocks. In 1997 cars and bikes shared the roads in equal numbers, but this time cars had clearly taken over. Over the weekend I hardly saw any bikes on the streets, although little flocks of them were parked at strategic points. Monday I saw more, but they were mostly segregated into bike lanes, sometimes set off by grassy medians.

The taxis had been reformed: they were all red, they all had A/C and they all used the meter. 10 yuan for the flag drop, and either 1.60 or 1.20 increments after that. The parks were still there, and the tourist sights, and the hole-in-the-wall shops. But one day I walked down Oxford Street -- only in Beijing. If it hadn't been for the signs in Chinese, it would have been hard to tell Wangfujing Dajie from a main shopping street in any European city. True, Chinese food markets were tucked down a couple of side streets, but Outback Steak House, KFC and McDonald's fought for attention on the main drag, alongside department stores and shopping malls.

Tibet and China

Yonghegong is a functioning Tibetan Buddhist Temple as well as a tourist stop (almost all the people I saw there were Chinese). Clouds of incense rose in front of each building -- you work your way north, building by building, towards the enormous (18 meters tall) sandalwood Buddha in the final hall. Most of the people lighting bundles of incense sticks were women, young or old rather than middle-aged. There were two exhibition halls devoted to Chinese ties to Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism, and Tibetan ties to Yonghegong. The same theme surfaced Sunday at the Museum of Chinese History. (It rained Sunday. All day. Definitely a museum day.) A whole exhibition was devoted to Tibet, with a massive model of the Potola Palace filling the first room. The exhibition mostly consisted of thangkas (sacred Buddhist paintings and embroideries), dated only to the dynasty, but the government's message from both exhibits was clear: Tibet is historically Chinese, and China has previously regulated Tibetan Buddhist lineages. I picked up a booklet on "40 years of Chinese Conservation of Tibetan Cultural Artifacts." It made interesting reading! (Remembering the wonderful art museum in Shanghai, I was surprised by the out-of-date display techniques in Beijing. Glass cases, exhibits lit from above only, labels with name and date only.)

The Four Altars

Many people visit the Temple of Heaven, which was built to shelter the Emperor when he went to sacrifice at the altar of heaven. But no one seems to pay attention to the other altars to the earth, sun and moon. I found the altar to earth -- officially the Altar of Land and Grain -- in what is now a memorial park to Sun Yat Sen southwest of the Forbidden City. Three marble steps lead up to a large square platform with a small round conical stone in the center and five colors of earth -- one color for each direction and one for the center. I didn't look for the other two altars -- they're for the next trips... (Oh, and the park had a children's playground complete with dodgem cars -- I figured they were practicing to be taxi drivers in Xi'an -- the little red taxis there were driven as if they had a charmed existence -- and lane markings were clearly purely advisory.)

The Night Market

Central Beijing's night market used to run off Wangfujing Street (the one that looks like a pedestrian version of Oxford St.) to the south of the (disappointing) Foreign Language Bookstore. The market was demolished to make way for a building project and reestablished north of the bookstore. The food was great but the charm had gone. It was a row of little square booths, all lined up, with plenty of trash cans and more foreign tourists than I'd yet seen in Beijing. There were a few veggie stalls, but most sold the same skewers of shrimp, meat of some kind, or insect larvae. One of the Aussies on the tour had made a big deal about how he was going to eat the scorpions we had heard about, but when he saw them he claimed that they were too small to bother with. Meanwhile, I ate delicious shrimp (10y), spicy chicken (5y) and mushrooms (5y). Since they were dunked in boiling oil while I watched I figured that they were pretty safe -- indeed, most street food seemed to be cooked hot enough to kill any undesirables. (For those who want the charm and some unidentifiable food there's also a day food section further south off the same street.)

The Great Wall

I met my tour group, four men, eight women (one woman in her eighties traveling with her daughter, and two women in their twenties, the rest forties-fifties) and we headed out for the tourist must-see, the Great Wall. It looks like the pictures -- just stunning. You head north from Beijing, and everything is flat, flat, flat. Then two hours out, the ground suddenly goes straight up to wonderful knife-edged ridges with the wall snaking over and around them. We went to the Mutianyu section -- when I was there in October '97 it was mobbed, mostly by Chinese. In August it was almost deserted -- and hellish hot. A luge had joined the cable car and chair lift for the lazy. My roommate Robyn walked down and said that she found a wonderful "stone city" not listed in the guide books.

Massage -- Chinese Style

When I asked Cathryn, the tour guide, about getting a massage, she sent me to the bath house in the parking lot of our hotel. Sign language and finger writing established that I could have a 45 minute massage for 98 yuan. After I changed my outdoor sandals for green indoor ones, I was led towards the back part of the house past a row of showers. The room I entered was small and dark. The massage table had an oval hole for my head, and was designed for a shorter clientele -- my toes hung over the edge. The masseuse, a man, spoke no English. I slipped off the sandals and lay on my back, fully clothed. He started with my head -- as much acupressure as massage. He also seemed to be working with the energy flows -- upward and vigorous on my scalp, smoother elsewhere. He snapped my fingers and wrists, and slapped my arms on the table, then worked a row of pressure points down my front. He paid less attention to my shoulders and upper back than my usual massage therapist, but worked my legs over well -- with the result that I had no ill effects from climbing a myriad of steps on the Great Wall. He did a fair amount of slapping, and put a lot of effort into the pressure points at the base of my spine. At the end he bent each leg at the knee, and then lifted it, bent, up and out -- it probably looked like a chicken wing. I had gone in hot, tired, and feeling slightly queasy. I came out feeling wonderful. It was a great return on 98 yuan.

Originally sent from Beijing Post Office