The Great Wall and Inner Mongolia

Great Wall and Inner Mongolia Trips
So as a UCLA student I’m part of UC-run Education Abroad Program (EAP) here in China. Meaning, that during the summer everyone in the Intensive Language Program was from one of the UC’s (Berkeley, LA, San Diego, etc.), although there were some Michigan and Wisconsin students in the program as well. Anyway, so the excellent EAP staff sponsored two insanely awesome pre-paid field trips during the month of July. The first one was to Chengde and the Great Wall of China, and the second was to Inner Mongolia. I already wrote an email to some family concerning the trips, so to save myself some time I’m going to copy and paste the emails here:

So last weekend we had a sweet little weekend trip to Chengde, a city of about 400,000 four hours outside of Beijing and went to some temples and other ok touristy stuff. On Saturday night we went to this place called Jin Tai Ling and got to climb the Great Wall of China...the following is an excerpt from my journal about the experience:

After a long day of getting on and off the bus we were already to go to our hotel for the night, looking forward to sleeping on the Great Wall. An hour an half drive later, we arrived at the JinShanLing hotel/part of the Great Wall. Unfortunately, while checking into the hotel (more like motel quality), we learned that the Chinese government had just issued an ordinance that morning banning anyone from sleeping on the Great Wall until the month the September. Apparently they feared terrorist attacks to disrupt the Olympic Games. We were all real pissed and our feisty group director did her best to fight for us by arguing with the two unkempt Chinese cops were the only ones reinforcing this ordinance. After much heated Chinese arguing, our travel agency and group director said that while we couldn’t sleep on the wall, we could get up at 3:30 am and begin climbing the wall by 4 am to catch the sunrise. Our travel agency felt so bad that they tried to put together a makeshift party that night with music a bonfire in front of the motel. This motel is situated out in the wilderness in a little valley, to give you an idea of where we were. I went to bed around 10 pm after watching the China-Japan women’s volleyball match anxious to see the Great Wall for the second time in my life.

Five and half hours later I woke up with my roommate and packed seven water bottles, a dwindling bag of Costco trail mix, two Zone protein bars, a zip-loc bag of sesame-covered almonds from the restaurant, and toilet paper into my backpack. Out of the 120 people in our group there were probably around 90 of us who had decided to get up at 3:30 am. We met in the restaurant lobby and ate the little breakfast packs the hotel had graciously prepared for us. At 4 am we set out for the twenty minute walk from the hotel to our starting point on the Great Wall. Let me give a little background on this part of the Great Wall. We were to hike about 14 km from Jin Shan Ling to Si Ma Tai, and we were told it’d probably take four to five hours of grueling step cimbing and descending. Let me just start off by saying this has by far been the best part of my time in China. This part of the wall has not been renovated for the most part, unlike it’s Beijing Ba Da Ling counterpart, and thankfully lacks the thousands of tourists that can be detrimental to any China experience. I was just in awe to be climbing this colossal piece of human workmanship as the sun began to rise over eastern hills. On both sides of me were the greenest hills and mountains I’ve seen in long time. With each tower (：louzi) that we went through another beautiful section of the wall was unveiled to us. It was just so picturesque the way the dawn light caressed the landscape; so picturesque, in fact, we actually saw some professional Chinese photographers taking Great Wall pictures on a hill adjacent to the wall. By 4:30 am it was already pretty light out, which was fortunate for us as most of the five hundred-year-old wall wasn’t renovated at all and caused some slippery slopes. Nothing too bad, but we did have to be careful as we began to sweat profusely up and down the steep, steep inclines and declines. It was one of those unique hikes that allows you to constantly have a gorgeous view of your surroundings, and I tried to picture ancient Chinese soldiers fighting off invading Mongolians. It was mind-blowing. Around 5:30/6 am we caught up to this seventy-ish year-old lady who claimed that she climbed this part of the Great Wall every morning at this time. This was incredible because even for us, healthy, young college students, climbing this wall was taking a major amount of physical strength and endurance. After a while we found she really climbs this wall everyday because she stops halfway between Jin Shan Ling and Si Ma Tai to peddle stuff to climbers. This is China: everyone has something to sell you. Most of the time I was walking with four friends of mine and one of the Chinese-college student staff, named Eric. He said he’s been to other parts of the Great Wall, but he said this climb was his favorite thus far. I had to agree, comparing it to my Ba Da Ling high school experience. Of course, it wouldn’t have been a complete Great Wall experience if we hadn’t peed off it. I’ll leave that experience at that.
Around 7 am we reached a gap in the wall and had to cross a modern rope bridge over a river to get to the other side. By this time some of us were beginning to cramp up and were soon relieved to find out that we had reached the Si Ma Tai, the end of our trek. By now the sun was beginning to scorch down on our sweat-trenched backs, so all in all we were all glad to have gotten up so early to do climb the wall. Even as we climbed into our buses that would take us back to the motel most of us began to doze off in exhaustion.


So that was the email about the great wall trip, the following email was written a couple weeks later in late July after our trip to Inner Mongolia:

Last weekend we had a weekend field trip to Inner Mongolia, so our entire program (about 115 people) took a sleeper train last Thursday night and woke up the next day in Huhhot, the capital city (pop. Approx. 2 million) of Inner Mongolia. For the politically curious, Inner Mongolia is a province of China, while Outer Mongolia is under it’s own control, or maybe Russian control, not sure exactly, but Inner Mongolia is definitely China. I could go into detail about the random touristy things that we did, but I’m going to jump straight to the two big highlights: 1. Going to the desert. This desert was like making Aladdin real life, sand as far as the eye could see, dunes rising and falling with the skyline. There were some different “sand activities” we could pay for, so I decided to ride a camel. It was interesting, besides the fact that the camel behind me practically ate my water bottle out of my pocket. We also got to go “sledding” down this giant sand dune, a descent of about 200 feet. Felt like sledding in snow…without the snow…and more sand. The next day we trekked by bus for about 3 hours through some mountains to get to the famous Mongolian Grasslands, where Ghengis Khan and his armies made names for themselves. The following is an excerpt from my journal about those two days:
We arrived at this obviously tourist-oriented Yurt (Inner Mongolian tent) camp. The Mongolians welcomed us off the bus with shots of baijiu (Chinese hard alcohol) and singing some Chinese song with an accordion. After dropping our luggage in our yurt (a Mongolian tent) we heard some cheering and saw a circle of people in the field by the yurt so we went over and tried to see what was happening. Our tour guides had said we could wrestle the Mongolians if we wanted to, and that’s what was happening. After watching a friend of mine wrestle one of them I figured I gave it a try. My friend said the rules were a little weird: 1. You can’t grab the other person’s legs, and 2. The person whose shoulders touch the ground first loses. The guy I wrestled ended up being the boss or something, cause he came out of nowhere and was wearing a polo and slacks. The first time he got me on the ground first but then I rolled him over on his back…but by Mongolian rules he won that round. Second round I threw him down on his back, and felt that we needed one more to settle it. I should have quit after I had won that second round though ‘cause he tripped me up and got me down first. I could make excuses and say because he was a little shorter than me he had a lower center of gravity or something, but in the end he won by his rules. The wrestling ended soon after and they took us into their dining building. For dinner they played music (strange Mongolian fiddle with electric techno style keyboard accompaniment and singing) while other Mongolians in traditional dress walked around all the tables giving everyone another shot of baijiu. Then they brought out the main course: three whole lambs in life like kneeling stances…but fully cooked. It was quite a scene to behold: the lambs had horns still and looked ready to pop off and go run through the grasslands. They cut up the three lambs and gave each table a good amount; it didn’t taste too bad, just a lot of fat. {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIMElXF5iyQhEuk4fW6KfYJNxRrIHXQb0B9JP8PMkebgcCiMVOpZJQ_dCUabBjT6eSZzz5L-_fjQSftDOvO87yvn7H0Qv3QLW-pOZA1P3NqRXTZcCBIZLVy9XXYlThkoojMemocBjlolAg/s1600-h/IMG_1027.JPG">That night they put on a sweet party for everyone there, us American students, Mongolian workers, and Chinese tourists also visiting. Once again, strange music ensued (e.g. Alvin and chipmunks rendition of Queen’s We Will Rock You). Add a large bonfire, Chinese people drinking alcohol, and lot of fireworks and you got yourself a fun time. I tried the baijiu a couple times and it didn’t taste so bad, but other people didn’t seem to agree.
I didn’t really sleep at all that night, as I was real uncomfortable in the yurt and then woke up at 4:30 am to see the sunset. It was a real cool sight to see this giant red ball rise over the Mongolian grasslands and burn off the low-lying mist. Most people who got up to see it went back to sleep, but I just found a rock overlooking this big grassland bowl thing and sat down to just admire God’s creation and pray a bit. That day wasn’t too exciting: we had the chance to ride horses or ATVS (at a price) or just hang out. I chose to go walk with some friends across the grasslands. The grasslands look like they could be in a scene from Braveheart or that one battle scene in the second Lord of the Rings movie, but everywhere you walk you hear and see locusts. Big ones with red and white wings. By the time we left I was ready for a good sleep, but the bus ride back was horrible as the driver again felt it was his duty to prove that he could driver faster than anything else on the road, even if that meant passing vehicles on the opposite side of the road with oncoming traffic closing in. We reached the Huhhot train station by early evening, and I made sure to take a Nyquil to sleep well; it worked.

So that basically sums up my two awesome field trips. Next time I’ll write about experiencing the Olympics and it’s events.