As far as gorges go, this one was pretty sweet
Actually did this trip on monday, but haven’t had much time to post since then. There’s barely been fifteen minutes this whole week where I haven’t been either wandering around china, doing homework, or sleeping; I generally write stuff here when I feel like studying isn’t getting me anywhere. In any event, the gorge was actually incredible. We got up bright and early Monday morning to catch our 8am bus for a two hour ride to the gorge. None of us had even heard of the place, much less knew what sorts of things to expect. All sorts of things from bungee jumping to hang gliding had been vaguely hinted at, though, so we were pretty excited (W/r/t/ hang gliding — it turned out to be a mistranslation of zipline. Unfortunately, I was way more interested in hang gliding than I was in bunjee jumping, so when the former option dissappeared I ended up doing neither. You can relax now, Mom).
Tacky? nahhh
Anyway, on the way to the gorge, we passed a big section of the Great Wall on the bus. We’re going there in a week or so with the president of Northwestern, which is cool. We have also been promised a very, very good meal at a relatively upscale hotel. I may or may not be looking forward to this more than the wall itself — this food is supposed to be incredible.
Once we got there, the only way to actually access the gorge and its river was to take a really long series of escalators up a mountain. It made me feel really, really lazy but was actually kind of awesome, especially considering that the Chinese have tastefully elected to conceal the escalators via a gigantic yellow dragon. Thus:
After we cleared the escalators, we found ourselves at the edge of a huge lake/river thing, which we naturally then cruised down to get to all the tourist attractions. The cruise itself though was probably one of my favorite parts of the trip though, considering that it was absolutely breathtaking the entire way. It eventually pulled up to a really sketchy metal dock in the heart of the gorge. We toured through a few temples, and then were set free to paddle around the lake in canoes, bunjee jump, zipline, or eat.
Bunjee jumping off the edge of some random Chinese gorge. What could go wrong?
I watched the bunjee jumpers for a while, ate, and then just wandered around. We weren’t there for too too long, and had to leave within a couple hours. We cruised back, then took a really cool alpine-slide style thing down to the base. Just, for a second, look at that slide thing.
Basically, aside from I guess the temples, there wasn’t a single man-made part of this trip that didn’t look hastily welded together and extremely unsafe. But the whole experience went off without a single hitch, which has forced me to reconsider a little bit — I think i’m gradually coming to accept that appearances aren’t everything here. Alternatively, I’m wrong, everything actually is super sketchy, and I’m just stupidly lucky and should probably already have died at the hands of an insane taxi driver or something. We’ll just have to see.
« Wangfujing Day-to-day »
I have some theories on some of those subjects:
1) After a long bout of discussion with this dude Hide who had lived in Beijing for a while, we decided that there were never any road accidents in Beijing because you never go over like 45 miles an hour. It just feels like you are. Generally you are only moving quickly relative to the other things on the road (bikes, overloaded bikes, pushcarts, oxen, groups of schoolchildren, zoo animals). But Beijing cab guys are experienced and generally don’t hit anything. God knows I should have been hit several times.
2) I think our perception of “safety” is largely colored by the American tendency to idiot-proof everything to avoid frivolous lawsuits, which aren’t really a problem in the CN since incentives for those are much weaker. Those like Alpine Slide things (also how you get down from the great wall at Ba Da Ling [or whatever] btw) are safe enough for most people most of the time, and in China that’s a green light, and in the States that’s a red light, and in Japan it’s bad quality control which is greatly troubling and can be very damaging to a company’s reputation and bring great shame onto everyone’s ancestors and basically just unbearable, unbearable shame and then hara-kiri, the end.
Hey – nice blog, just looking around some blogs, seems a pretty nice platform you are using. I’m currently using WordPress
My first comment. Found your blog a couple of times inadvertently. Yours is one of those blogs I could start reading and not know when to stop.