It turns out it’s harder to find swallows in a city of 20 million people than one of 2 million people. This is because you can’t ask a taxi driver to “take you to the main market,” or take you to the “old part” of the city. The taxi drivers think you’re crazy when you say this. There is just too much city to deal with.
We needed to go to Beijing because to meet up with Nana Li, one of Liu Yu’s labmates, who is working in Qingdao this summer. Nana Li had never collected blood samples before, so we agreed to stop in Beijing to train her before we headed farther north. We arrived in Beijing after 3 days of working to Baotou, a small city in Inner Mongolia. Our time in Baotou was mostly unremarkable: we caught swallows at night and slept during the day (especially me, since I was sick), and ate at the Sichuan restaurant across from our train station hotel. We banded birds in the lobby of a rest station- a place with beds where people could sleep while waiting for buses. We drew a crowd of boozy, chain-smoking onlookers, which at this point in our travels is hardly noteworthy. My only interesting thought about Baotou came weeks later, when I was reading Paul Theroux’s 1988 book about train travel in China. He offhandedly referred to Baotou as a Mongolian city, and I realized we had yet to see a Mongolian in China. The Han seem to have successfully colonized their borderlands.
We were all excited to get from the backwaters of Baotou to the big city of Beijing. Liu Yu went to university there, so he was eager to see old friends. Caroline and I wanted to see the Great Wall. We were halfway through our work in China and hadn’t had a day off, so I decided we could have an extra 2 days in Beijing to rest, see the sights, and catch up on computer work before our big push to more remote regions in the north and west.
But before any fun could happen, we had to find swallows, so we spent our first day scouring the city. We found some grimy neighborhoods around markets that had birds in their mazes of alleyways, but we only saw two nests. Next, Liu Yu remembered seeing some swallows in the “tourist area,” and we ended up in the Hutong neighborhoods in central Bejiing. These lovely stone courtyard-style houses, connected by networks of alleyways, used to be all over Beijing, but most have now been bulldozed to build high-rises. The few remaining Hutong are a tourist attraction surrounding a few small lakes. Strips of restaurants, cafes, and bars line the central alleys, little stands hawk souvenirs, and swan boats ply the opaque green water. When we arrived, I found a familiar landmark on the lakeshore: the same Starbucks I had seen the last time I was in Beijing, 8 years ago. In 2006, my friend and I stopped in Beijing after traveling through Southeast Asia, and were amazed to find a Starbucks- we hadn’t seen one anywhere else in Asia. Back then, we took pictures and ordered Frappucinos. Now Starbucks are all over every city in China.
Despite the crowds and electric lights, the Hutong area was still filled with old houses, which barn swallows love. We found a few nests, but they were in areas too heavily trafficked to make netting possible. After some discussion with a taxi driver, we finally found what we wanted in a big market 20km from the city center (but still well within the Beijing city limits): a cluster of 10 swallow nests. It wasn’t as many as we’d hoped for, but they took 11 hours of searching to find, and were the best we were going to do. The market would be quiet at night, and since most of the people who worked there were from other parts of China, they wouldn’t be bothered by foreigners (according to Liu Yu, people from Beijing can be suspicious of foreigners).
We got back to our hotel around 7pm, had dinner, and were on our way back to the market at 9. Since Nana Li needed to practice blood sampling we worked slower than usual, and it was nearly 4am by the time we made it back to our hotel. We ended the night with 13 swallows, although we should have had 15- a security guard kicked us out of the market as we were setting up a net at our last nest. Still, it was a respectable evening.
We spent the next day sleeping and working, and Caroline and I went to the Wangfujing Night Market for dinner. Liu Yu warned us ahead of time that we should look but not eat, which turned out to be a good suggestion. The market is famous for its stalls serving a huge variety of crazy foods: fried scorpions, tarantulas, starfish, whole skewered chicks, and snake kebabs are all on offer. This is not traditional Chinese food- it’s designed purely for foreign tourists to shriek and take photos. We wandered around and sampled some tamer dishes (dumplings, grilled squid), none of which were particularly tasty. Since we had gone all the way to the market, we also tried some fried termites and sea worms. The termites tasted like potato chips and the worms were gross. But the photos were admittedly cool.
The next day we finally got to see the ultimate China attraction: the Great Wall. Liu Yu just laughed when we asked him if he wanted to come with us, so Caroline and I booked a tour and set off early in the morning. We wanted to do a long hike, and I had been to the Jinshanling-Simitai section of the wall before, so we went on the 10km “wild wall” trip from Jiankou to Mutianyu.
We drove 2 hours into the mountains outside Beijing, through suburbs that extended for miles and then seamlessly gave way to golf courses and summer retreats for city dwellers. We also passed a larger-than-normal construction site, which our guide, Steven, told us was the site of an upcoming APEC conference. This gathering (the Asia Pacific Economic Conference) seems to be the Olympics of diplomacy, as we learned last year in Vladivostok, host of the 2012 conference. In an effort to impress global dignitaries, the controversial and multi-billion dollar facelift of Vladivostok included such absurdities as two massive new suspension bridges connecting the city to the small harbor island, approximately 300m away, on which the conference was held; a new airport; and a new highway running from the airport, across Vladivostok, and to one of the bridges- with no other exits, which we discovered to our frustration after a wrong turn.
The smog makes it impossible to tell from the city, but Beijing is surrounded by wildly-forested mountains. We wound our way up narrow roads until we reached a small village, and set out hiking through the forest en route to the wall, which was (astonishingly) built along the ridgelines. As we hiked upwards, I heard a familiar sound- not a barn swallow, but a greenish warbler, the species I studied for my Ph.D. Nostalgia.
The view when we reached the top of the watchtower was straight out of a postcard. The crumbly wall snaked for miles along precipitous ridges, the battlements and watchtowers emerging from the forest like plates on the back of a stegosaurus- or, more appropriately for China- a dragon. The scale of the walls was staggering, and confusing: if invading armies had managed to claw their way up to the top of the sheer mountain cliffs, surely another 10m of wall wouldn't be much of a deterrent? But no matter. Literally standing on top of such an epic piece of human history made all discussion of logic seem trivial.
The view when we reached the top of the watchtower was straight out of a postcard. The crumbly wall snaked for miles along precipitous ridges, the battlements and watchtowers emerging from the forest like plates on the back of a stegosaurus- or, more appropriately for China- a dragon. The scale of the walls was staggering, and confusing: if invading armies had managed to claw their way up to the top of the sheer mountain cliffs, surely another 10m of wall wouldn't be much of a deterrent? But no matter. Literally standing on top of such an epic piece of human history made all discussion of logic seem trivial.
After taking too many photographs, we set off hiking along the top of the wall. The first 5km or so were along the “wild wall”- an unrestored section nearly swallowed by the forest. We were alone, save for a few foreign hikers and a large group of Chinese “adventure tourists,” who were tricked out in brand-new high-end gear, two-way radios, GPS units, and gigantic cameras, and who delightedly grabbed us to pose for many, many photos before lighting up cigarettes. We walked quickly on ahead of them.
We finished the hike along a restored section of wall- a few kilometers where the forest had been cleared away and the paving stones smoothed out. This area had considerably more tourists, and Steven told us excitedly that this was the place Michelle Obama had visited a few weeks before. “But,” he told us conspiratorially, “she only visited 5 watchtowers in two hours. You have visited 26 watchtowers on this hike! In only 3 hours!” We also learned all the dishes Michelle Obama had eaten in China, and that most of the restaurants had now renamed those dishes in her honor.
We finished the hike along a restored section of wall- a few kilometers where the forest had been cleared away and the paving stones smoothed out. This area had considerably more tourists, and Steven told us excitedly that this was the place Michelle Obama had visited a few weeks before. “But,” he told us conspiratorially, “she only visited 5 watchtowers in two hours. You have visited 26 watchtowers on this hike! In only 3 hours!” We also learned all the dishes Michelle Obama had eaten in China, and that most of the restaurants had now renamed those dishes in her honor.
As we climbed down endless staircases, we noticed large characters on the nearby hillside and asked what they were. “Oh, something about long live Mao,” said Steven. That seemed strange and ironic, to have the Chairman’s name blazoned next to the indelible symbol of China’s emperors. Perhaps not so surprising though, since our Great Wall hike ended with another modern embellishment: instead of hiking down from the Mutianyu watchtower, we rode down little carts on a luge track, and landed in a pile of souvenir shops. In our experience, the Chinese haven’t yet found a historic or natural site they didn’t want to spruce up and attach some souvenir shops to.
After our two-day break (and fortified by a good meal of Peking duck), we were ready to head off on the wildest leg of our trip: up north towards the Siberian border, and then way out west to the Tibetan Plateau. We left Beijing via overnight train to Harbin, excited to have the bright lights in our rearview and be heading back to the backwaters.
-Liz
After our two-day break (and fortified by a good meal of Peking duck), we were ready to head off on the wildest leg of our trip: up north towards the Siberian border, and then way out west to the Tibetan Plateau. We left Beijing via overnight train to Harbin, excited to have the bright lights in our rearview and be heading back to the backwaters.
-Liz