6. Traveling in China

By Ellen McCaffrey, 
English Department Head, Soldan International Studies High School, St. Louis Public Schools

I knew that a long airplane ride would be necessary to get to Beijing when several other St. Louis area teachers and I visited China last summer. Little did I know, however, that while we shared the adventure of touring China for three weeks, air travel would be only one of many transportation modes employed to see this fascinating, ancient country.

Our group was constantly moving, absorbing the scenes of cities and rural areas, ancient and modern side by side. Inside China, we traveled on foot, by plane, bus, train, boat, cable car, rickshaw, and motorbike. Although we did not ride on bicycles to get to our destinations in China, we had to be careful to avoid their onslaught when we were on foot. Beijing's streets vibrate with the movement of bicycles. The streets around Peking University are particularly alive with students pedaling their bicycles to get to classes.

In Beijing, our home was the Shaoyuan Guest House-really a modern hotel-at Peking University. Elevators took us to our rooms each day after our tours around the city. From Peking University, we rode our reliable bus to see the Summer Palace, Tiananmen Square, the Temple of Heaven, the Ming Tombs, the Forbidden City, Mao's Mausoleum. When we climbed the Great Wall at the Jinyong Pass outside Beijing, we were transported to the gate by bus; we struggled valiantly on foot to climb the uneven steps to the pavilions along the wall. The steps were designed to deter ancient invaders. We learned that the Chinese wall builders were not aware that tourists would be climbing those same steps a thousand years later, wanting only to admire the Chinese countryside from the vantage point of that engineering marvel.

The steps on the Great Wall challenged even the most physically fit among us, but the most determined and able-bodied managed to climb to the highest pavilion and work their way down on the opposite side from their starting point. It took about two hours to complete the trek that way. 

In the hutongs surrounding the Forbidden City, rickshaws provided our transport. In the soft summer rain, we teachers were maneuvered through the narrow, ancient streets by strong, able drivers who skillfully wended their way through the pathways of the oldest parts of Beijing. We stopped to see the lush gardens, carefully tended by families whose ancestors had lived in the homes they now occupied. Many hutong families have been there for several generations. The highlight of the hutong tour was the homemade meal cooked for us in a tiny kitchen and served in the small dining room of a home that had been inhabited by members of the same family for over four hundred years. A television set, refrigerator, and computer were evidence that we were in the twenty-first century, but it was very easy to imagine that time had not moved since the seventeen hundreds.

The ancient walls, gardens, and shrines inside the hutong reminded us of another far away time, and the rickshaws, propelled over bumpy streets by the strong legs of the men pulling on their long handles, allowed us the experience of a transportation mode that did not belong to the present.

From Beijing, we flew to Xian. On board the plane, the carefully coiffed and beautifully made up flight attendants treated the passengers to a syncopated recitation of the flight safety instructions. Each young woman made the same movement as the safety rules were recited in Chinese. Their exact coordination was a dance at thirty thousand feet.

In Xian, we drove to the site of the terracotta warriors. As we walked through the archaeological dig, we saw that each life-sized warrior had a distinct face. Each was marching, driving a cart, shooting a bow, or caring for horses to serve the Emperor Qin Shihuangdi.

Jinan was our next stop. We took a boat ride across a lake in Jinan's Spring Garden Park. The touring boat had a pagoda-shaped roofline, with upturned corners, which we were told were there to ward off evil. Breezes comfortably wafted over us in the summer air, making this short water excursion very pleasant. 

We moved on to Taian, at the base of sacred Mount Tai. A cable car, suspended two thousand feet over a rugged but green crevasse would take us half way up Taishan, where our goal was to see the sunrise the next morning. To do this we relied on modern skiing technology to get us halfway up the mountainside. In groups of four or five, we were ushered into small capsule-like compartments with transparent sides that allowed us to view the valley below. Suspended in the cable car, we moved steadily up the mountainside. Some passengers admired the rugged scenery as we progressed in altitude. Others declined to acknowledge our suspension over the deep valley by refusing to look down. The view of the terrain from half a mile up was spectacular and breathtaking, but we were all aware that only a moving cable line was holding us up. For some that was a frightening fact.

The ski lift took us only part of the distance needed to get to the top. We disembarked at the cable-car station and began on foot to ascend the distance to our hotel. This feat reminded many of us of our visit to the Great Wall: we climbed ancient steps, irregularly worn down by millions of footsteps over hundreds of years. Carrying our luggage made this adventure even more daunting than the Great Wall ascent, but we all made it to the Shenqi Hotel before the afternoon fog surrounded us, and made it dark at four in the afternoon on a June day. The next morning, most of us awoke at four a.m. to climb even higher on the mountain to see the sun rise. We moved slowly through the dense fog, barely able to see the person a foot ahead of us. Wearing heavy military coats to keep us warm in the early morning chill, we trudged to the viewing areas to see the sun come up. We waited...and waited...and saw...the sky gradually get lighter. No sunrise that morning. To get down the mountain, we reversed the process of getting to the top. We walked down the mountainside to the point of the cable station, and rode the cable car to the bottom, where we boarded the bus to move on to our next stop.

Our bus took us to Qufu, the hometown of Confucius. From Qufu, we moved on to Nanjing. Transportation mode: an overnight train. We boarded the train for Nanjing at eleven p.m. Many of us had never before traveled by train anywhere, so this experience was a new one for some. We were expected to sleep on the train as we moved across China into Nanjing. Four bunks were arranged in each of the sleeping cars we were assigned. Two bunks were on either side of the car, one on top of the other. For some this was an opportunity to spend the night talking and laughing. Others tried to sleep. I could not sleep at all. The train's moving and stopping periodically at stations to take on passengers or cargo kept me awake all night. I became used to the bright lights at each stop flooding through the windows and the squeal of the brakes as we came into the stations throughout the night. Early in the morning, I moved from my bunk to look outside as the day began. I saw farmers bent over, working in their fields. I saw water buffalo reluctant to start their day's work. I smelled wood fires burning, and I could feel the fresh, cool morning air as the world awoke before me. I consciously tried to imprint these images on my brain. I was seeing the daily lives of many Chinese as they had been lived for eons in the past.

One of the most relaxing days was the Fourth of July, spent cruising the Li River, from Guilin into Yangshuo. We boarded the triple-tiered cruise boat and spent much of the day watching the people on shore and marveling at the flat, high rock formations along the river. The scenery revealed that Chinese painters painted from nature those mountains that were tall and thin. They really are that way! Other sites often found in Chinese paintings were there, too: fishermen were angling and small old villages dotted the riverbank as we moved southward. We were treated to a meal cooked on board the boat, and were offered snake wine, with the snake inside the bottle!

Our Li River destination was Yangshuo, where another travel adventure awaited us. Our guide arranged for a tour of the countryside. We were going outside the town on motorbikes. The teachers sat in the sidecars, while young Chinese women drove the motorcycles into the rural farm areas. Rice paddies, vegetable gardens, and "hope" schools became the subjects of our photographs of this part of China. The farm work was done with water buffalos and manpower. We saw no tractors in the fields.

We ended our tour of China in Shanghai. Riding into the city on a bus, I was amazed at the contrast between the countryside outside Yangshuo and the fast-growing and bustling city of Shanghai. As we drove into the outskirts of Shanghai, skyscrapers came into view. Skyscrapers and more skyscrapers continued along the highway. The view of tall buildings went on as far as we could see as we got closer to the center of Shanghai - even New York City's buildings are diminished by the sheer numbers of modern high rises being built in Shanghai today. Our guide told us that the maps of Shanghai have to be revised every four months to accommodate the continuing growth of the city. Our time in Shanghai was very short, but we managed one more boat "ride" there. We had dinner on board a boat moored on the Yangtze River.

Our last bus ride to the airport the next day was bittersweet. We were looking forward to going home, but we were leaving a place that had transported us to destinations we could not have imagined had we not been there and seen them for ourselves. China is a fascinating place. In three weeks, using many ways of transportation, we only touched the surface of it.

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