Beijing

While Shanghai embodies creative optimism and energy, Beijing feels like Soviet-era eastern bloc communism. Buildings are drab, boxy, concrete slabs of functionality. The watchful eye of the uniformed seems to be everywhere. Even the sky is grey. And yet, within this lie the Forbidden City and other ancient temples and towers dating from when China was ruled by an emperor in Beijing.


My first hours in the capital are spent looking for a watch on Wangfujing street, a pedestrian shopping area with Cartier, Ermenegildo Zegna and other brand name shops. Chinese tourists cram the street, many in groups wearing coordinated baseball caps and vests being led by a guide holding a pink umbrella or other outlandish identifying stick. Many of these tourists are much older than the youths of Shanghai. I wander down a side alley and find myself stepping back in time among food stalls selling pork and beef, along side cricket, beetle and other unidentifiable meat-on-a-stick. Further back is another intersecting side street lied with stalls selling all manner of tourist souveniers. Chinese lanterns dangle from stylized dynastic archways. It is all fake, reproduction, imitation. The Chinese tourists eat it up.


In the evening I meet the seven other travelers I will be with for the next 4 weeks. Our guide Nigel is big and not only by Chinese standards. At 6'5" and 120+ kilos he can't be missed in a crowd. He is from Australia and says he has the greatest job in the world. There is Andrew and Maggie, newlyweds from the UK, bankers taking a 12 month leave to travel around the world for their honeymoon; Kylie, a blonde, blue-eyed Aussie fond of 1980s rock and following up our trip with a two or three week trek in Nepal; Lynette, another blue-eyed Aussie, works for a television station and has quite a goofy side to her; and Lauren and Matt, an Aussie couple just in from Africa, he tall, quiet, bearded and wearing a straw hat, she short, sunburnt and disarmingly good at saying whatever thought pops into her head, and there are quite a few. So, I'm a Yank surrounded by five Aussies and two Brits. And hopefully I've been diplomatic in my descriptions.


The next day we take a trip to the Great Wall at Mutianyu. The sky is unusually clear and blue. Our bus ride takes us through uninteresting suburbs and farmland. When we arrive at the wall, Lynette turns to me and says, "It's such a small world, you could easily run into somone you know here." I think about how probable that is for me and laugh. "I don't think so." Yet two hours into our wall hike (and it is quite a workout) a woman passes me. I stop and go up to her. "Do you speak English?" "Yes." "Do I know you?" I ask. She looks at me. "Yes, from the Inca Trail trek" in 2006. It is Sabine. We laugh, exchange stories and agree to friend each other on Facebook. Small world indeed. Or, rather, a continuation of my karma tour 2008.

The next day we visit Tianenmen Square and The Forbidden City. Tianenmen square is jammed with more Chinese tour groups, again wearing matching baseball caps. The line of elderly citizens waiting to see the embalmed Chairman Mao is endless. Our guide says we are not allowed to take photos of anyone in uniform, or any Chinese citizen being "reeducated." And the Forbidden City is clearly no longer forbidden to the great masses. We have to fight our way in.