notes and images
Home to pandas and spicy foods, Chengdu is, oh, right, you mean Chengde?
Yes. Chengde. Four hours up the freeway from Beijing, not four hours by plane. Chengde doesn’t, and probably never did, have pandas. But as the Qing Dynasty’s summer resort it has beautiful gardens, an impressive replica of Lhasa’s Potala Palace, laid back people and a great vegetarian restaurant. Sounds like a perfect weekend destination.
April 2015: Half way up a narrow, steep, crumbling, five hundred year old staircase is not the place to decide to turn around and climb down. It’s still less the place to switch places with your friend. But when I looked at the sagging lower layer of bricks and the loose sand around them, I decided that hauling myself over the top of the nearly two meter brick wall in front of me was too risky. It was the last obstacle before the top, but I didn’t want it to be my last obstacle ever. Cause of death? Crushed in a rockfall. No thanks.
Far to Beijing’s north, the Great Wall runs roughly along the border with Hebei Province. Just west of the well-known “wild wall” at Gubeikou is a little-visited but wonderful section of Ming Dynasty Great Wall called Beihualing – Beihua Ridge. It has everything: dramatic towers, ridgeline wall, remoteness, beautiful Ming stonework lying just where it fell centuries ago, and a really big fort. Just up the road is the equally impressive White Horse Pass, or Baimaguan.
Click through for photos of this incredible area.
The experiment: Shanghai-Beijing. Which takes more time door to door? The plane, or the train?
The result: It’s closer than you might think.
It’s true that you don’t get much sense for a place on business trips. Airports, hotels, conference rooms; if you’re lucky the program includes a “cultural performance” or “typical local restaurant”. Depending on the nature of the trip you enjoy this bit or endure it, waiting to go home to family and friends.
Occasionally though, usually in odd destinations with few outbound flights per day, you wind up with time up your sleeve between the closing remarks and the boarding call. So it was two autumns back when I found myself with an afternoon in Ulan Bator.
There’s only so many Chinese New Years you want to spend in Beijing. Cold, fireworks so incessant it sounds like one of those week-long artillery barrages from some horrible war, and smog spikes from all that gunpowder smoke. Oh for somewhere a little warmer, clearer, and quieter. This year, having run out of entries on our China visas, we travelled “guo nei” and took the short hop down to Fujian Province’s Wuyi Mountains…
Self portrait with GPS
Recently, one of Journeys, &c’s most loyal readers asked about choosing a GPS solution for hiking. Though far from expert, I’ve had a bit of experience using GPS, including to save my bacon on at least one occasion.
The trick with GPS is to know how to survive without it. Once you can do that, it adds a welcome margin of safety and convenience to your trips. Read on for the Journeys, &c take on this great technology.
June 2016: For only my fourth dayhike without a child on my back in the 16 months since she was born, I headed out to the far northeastern corner of Beijing Municipality. Deep in the forest, beyond an impressive fort, lies this remarkable gate structure. Complete with the stone framework for the gate raising mechanism, and apparently original dragon face decoration, it’s like nothing I’ve seen anywhere else on the Great Wall around Beijing.
Click through for more photos of this remote area.
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