Day 6: Beijing (Thurs; 3 Apr)

 Tour 1; Day 2

Today's tour schedule:

• Great Wall
• Summer Palace
• Olympic Park

 We were up way early again (3:15 AM for me - still not on China time), at breakfast at 6:30 for the same buffet with some slight variation, and on the bus for the Great Wall (GW) at 8.  (We would later come to appreciate the buffet at the this hotel as it was one of the best.) 

The 2-hour bus ride to the Mutianyu section of the GW took us through a typical big city city to country-side transition.  Some of the apparent differences between Beijing and LA include the facts that Beijing has ~21.4 million people whereas LA has ~4.40 million.  However, Beijing is purported to have a much lower population density of 1300 people/km^2 versus LA's 3200 people/km^2.  This is a bit misleading.  While the city of Beijing is more than 11 times larger than LA, it doesn't appear that the people are spread out evenly about the city's area.  In fact, today's trip (and to an even greater extent when we visited other big cities like Xi'An, etc.) illustrated how efficient China is in putting a lot of people in small areas using high-rise housing.  It appears that China developers have a small number of multi-family, high-rise building designs, pick one for a given area, then build 10 to 100 or more of the same building design as close as they can to each other.  The 30+ story buildings have ~10 "flats" on each floor which vary in room number and consequent family size (this description of "flats" from our guide, who owns his flat in Guangzhou).  I see in my journal that I found many, but not all, of these housing buildings to be quite dreary bordering ugly. 

Fun fact; all the land in China is owned by the government.  Individuals and businesses can build on the land (with the permission of the gov't, of course) but the builders never own the land, which leads to the obvious conclusion that the gov't has ultimate control over what buildings get built, and how long they stay there.  At first blush this sounds tenuous but seems to work well as, we all know, literally thousands of companies have built manufacturing facilities in China in the last 20+ years or so.

Anyway, that's a long way of saying we saw a lot of high-rise housing units on our way to Mutianyu as well as a lot of small farms along the freeway. I couldn't tell what crops were being raised, but it wasn't rice (which was almost the sole crop of southern China farms). Two hours on the bus got us to Mutianyu (thankfully, 2 hours turned out to be about the limit of our tour bus endurance...).

A note regarding the freeways.  Most of the roads the bus took us down were quite modern and very well maintained.  They were, without exception, all toll roads and traffic was light to moderate unless headed into or out of a big city (read Beijing, Shanghai, etc.) where the traffic was as bad (or maybe slightly worse) than any freeway in CA or NY.  It was clear during our entire trip that China is all in regarding investing in infrastructure - multi-family housing, roads, trains and airports - a day did not go by where there we didn't see several big infrastructure projects in progress.

We got to the entrance to the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall where there were several educational displays.  As you can readily learn from the internet, the Great Wall is not one wall but a collection of several walls built by different Chinese Dynasties over a period more than 1,000 years and over 3,900 miles long.  After the entrance gate there's a sort of vendor's area along with a variety of restaurants.  We passed all of these to get to a shuttle bus, walked some more to a tram then made our way up to the wall.  It was actually a bit tricky getting up and down from the wall itself.  In the US the transit would be a lawyer's dream, I don't know if China has lawyers...  We walked along small portions of the wall.  What the pictures don't capture is how steep just walking on along the top of the wall is.  As you look to the next tower, as tempting as it might be to walk there (and you're welcome to) you can't help but think either "that's a fairly steep climb" or "if we go down there we'll have to come back up".  We entered at tower 14 and walked to towers 13 and 15, which took the better part of the hour the tour guide allotted.  We made our way down, visiting the vendor shops along the way and had lunch at a Chinese buffet in the restaurant area.  More shopping after lunch and on to the bus for the 1.5 hour drive to the Summer Palace.

The Summer Palace was spectacular.  Built along a natural lake that was significantly expanded to mimic a lake in southern China that the emperor at the time liked, it is an area of 1.1 square miles with over 3,000 ancient buildings. This, like many of these Chinese structures, was built during the reigns of several emperors.  One associated story goes, according to our guide, that the beginning of the end of feudalism began with the 11 year period that the only female empress, Empress Dowager Cixi, bankrupt the country by diverting funds from 1884 through 1895 designated for the Chinese Navy towards the reconstruction and enlargement of the Summer Palace to celebrate her 60th birthday (Subsequent research via Wikipedia suggests there is much more to the story than this "official" version).  Whatever the actual history is the Palace, associated gardens and lake are quite beautiful today.

From the Summer Palace it was back on the bus and on to the site of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.  Apparently the grounds, stadiums and such are used today for special events.  The grounds were very large and showcased some spectacular engineering - the viewing tower, national stadium and the aquatic center being the most prominent.  Although we'd seen most of these on TV during the games they, like so many large structures, are much more impressive in person. And, like so much else of this blog, the pictures don't capture the spectacularity (yeah, I just made up a word...). 

After about an hour of wandering around the Olympic grounds it was back on the bus, straight to (as I wrote in my journal) another adequate but not memorable Chinese restaurant for dinner.  We were in bed at 9:30, still trying to get on to China time...

Here are some pix...

Multi-family, multi-story housing units in the distance as we make our way to Mutianyu.  Over the next few days we'd see 1,000 or more of these, or very similar, buildings.

The Mutiangyu section of the Great Wall - about 3.3 miles (~.01% of the entire wall).  The tram takes you to a foot path that leads to tower 14.

That's it, The Great Wall, way up there just below the ridge line, traversing left and right before going up and over on the left and down the ridge on the right.  Looks like any highway through the mountains in Colorado until you reflect on the fact that this entire wall was built by hand.

Using 30X zoom you start to get a sense of what's up there...

 

... and walking to the tram, even more so...

After the shuttle bus walking up the to tram.

The tram to the tower 14 foot path.

On the wall looking towards the part that goes right along the ridge line and down in the picture above.

Another "We were there" picture...

Looking out of one tower (I forget which one) up that ridge line to the left in the picture above.

Recall the animals (10 of them) on the corners of the roof of  Imperial Palace?  The guards/army only get a couple...

This captures a little bit of the up and down.  We walked out the that tower in the distance.

This shows some sense of the height of the wall.  Not much future for folks trying to attack from the bottom...

This is actually not the Summer Palace, which, I believe, is the building up and behind this one.  The large building in front is Yuanjing Temple, built in 1494, for a wet nurse.  

This is the boat we took from our side of the lake to the palace side.

Some sights while on the boat...

Originally I thought this was the "palace".  I've since come to believe that it's just another one of the many impressive buildings amongst the ensemble of lakes, gardens and palaces. 

Under the category Excess - "Did feudal frivolous excess know no bounds?" this marble boat (no, it did not float), which was built so the emperor and his/her court could "take tea" on the lake, might give a hint.

Continuing along the "frivolous expense" theme, here is the Long Corridor.  A ~ 1/2 mile long covered walkway lined with over 14,000 different paintings to amuse the emperor as he walked "protected from the elements".

The viewing tower at the Olympic Grounds...

Most of us recall "The Birds Nest", officially the National Stadium

Under the category "Strange But True", this structure, adorned with the Olympic Rings, was built from 2011 - 2014, after the games... Still, pretty impressive.