2018, Central Asia

The CCTV Tower in Chaoyang

We wake up early this morning to go visit the great wall. As it’s not close to the city, you need to get there either with a tour or with a private driver. We opt for the latter. It turns out to be a lucky move, as it takes nearly two hours to go to the point we chose. It’s a part of the wall called Mutianyu and it’s not one of the most visited. In theory, at least.

Once in Mutianyu, a cable car takes the lazy ones like us directly on the hills on top of which the wall stands. After quite a long queue, a stunning view, and a finally breathable air welcomes us. The landscape of the mountains surrounding Beining is breathtaking, just as the steps we have to climb to get to the top!

On the wall there is a little bit more of foreign tourists compared to what we saw yesterday, mainly Italian, French and Americans. Anyway, more than 80% of tourists visiting at this time of the year are, as usual, Chinese.

The steepest part begins after a pretty easy walk of around an hour. Before that, an unsuspectable old man succeeds in selling us the most expensive bottle of water of the whole China, with a clever, and pretty demotivating “very long, very long”. As soon as we reach barely half the way of the steep stairway, an officer starts yelling at the tourists, throwing his hat to the floor, apparently telling them to turn back. We reluctantly follow the orders and, an hour later, we’re back to the starting point. We have barely the time to get into the car and a violent rainstorm falls on us, to our major relief as we’re already heading back to Beijing.

Here we have to ditch Plan A, the Summer Palace, because of the bad weather so we ask the driver to lead us to the silk market, which is a kind of center mall with all kinds of different products, from fake branded handbags to electronics and even jewelry (also fake, of course). We are not looking for anything in particular, but the fact that the market is a dry place is good enough to keep us there for at least four hours (of course, it stopped raining in the meanwhile). We find a lot of interesting things, except silk! There are some taylor shops who also sell fabrics, which is one of the things Prisca is interested in, but the fabrics are not original enough. The most funny thing is that in most shops you can bargain to buy what you want for the best price. Prices indicated on the products are quite high, which is almost an invitation to bargain. A product that is indicated as worth 2000 yuan, for example, can be sold, after hard (or very quick) negotiation, for 200 yuan or even less! It’s quite surprising, and you quickly get in the game of bargaining! In the end, we left with some funny gadgets for the home and spent a little below 50 euro.

Not far from the Silk Market there is the fanciest part of the Chaoyang neighborhood, sporting 5-star hotels, european boutiques and some of the most awe-inspiring skyscrapers of the city, among which stands the CCTV tower belonging to the main Chinese TV company. Challenging the laws of physics the building emerges from the fog as in an post-apocalyptical sci-fi movie. “We’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe”! Time to leave!