Beijing - Trip to Badaling

Xue Sheng

All weight is underside
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I forgot to add something about Beijing (I forgot to add a lot actually) but after this I am probably done rattling on about it. Once again I am finding it hard to put this into the right words, bear with me I will stop soon.

On my trip from the City of Beijing to the countryside of Beijing, when I was going to Badaling to the Great Wall I saw something that I found to be very impressive.

As you drive out of the very modern city of Beijing on a 6 lane highway that eventually becomes a 4 lane highway. Except for the fact I was in a car, as I looked out the window and the city gives way to countryside, it almost looks like I was slowly going back in time. The terrain is virtually flat, dry and becomes pretty much open space with scattered farms and houses. Then on the horizon, almost out of nowhere appear very large and old mountains. And like everything else in China they are huge, they may not be as high as some of the mountains in the US, but they are high, steep and go on as far as the eye can see (almost a natural wall). As I got closer to them the further back in time it felt like I was going. These mountains look as though sometime back in old China they may have been terraced for farm land, but that is doubtful. Not enough rain in the North to support it and I do not think even in China they could have terraced every single mountain. It is more likely from erosion, and that says these are very old mountains.

As you travel into these mountains passing trucks having problem because of the grade of the road and looking at the amazing scenery, you go through a long tunnel cut through one of these mountains, I am told that you use to have to drive over and that the tunnel cut about an hour off the trip, you see the Wall and for me it was very impressive, equally as impressive as huge mountains seeming to pop up out of flat land.

As for the Great Wall at Badaling, it was also huge and very impressive to me. But I have wanted to go to the Great Wall for most of my life so I am not surprised.

When I arrived at Badaling there were the expected tourists and vendors everywhere. (I didn’t expect camels, and they were offering camel rides, but I declined.) Not as many tourists as would be there later (If you go to Badaling, go early, and on the wall, go left - steeper climb, fewer people) but a lot. And as I was looking at the wall and some of the older buildings I saw it, a bastion of the West…..Starbucks. It just seemed very out of place there, Chinese calligraphy and pinyin and then Starbucks. And in my opinion they still can’t make a good cup of coffee.

OK, I think I'm done, thanks for putting up with all this. You don't have to worry again until 2009.
 

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