Situated north of Beijing Longqing Gorge offers refuge for
those tired of living in the polluted capital. Eunju and I had been planning on
going for some time and had calculated the route there expecting it to take up
around 2 hours by bus.
When I awoke that morning I felt rather uneasy with a minor stomachache.
It wasn’t going to scupper my plans for the day and thought I’d be able to
shake it off once I had a coffee inside me.
We boarded bus 919 and followed our progress on the map. We
started to notice that the journey was taking much longer than anticipated,
then we realised that we weren’t on the express bus. We were on the slow bus
going around the houses. This very disappointing turn of events twinned with my
stomach becoming more uncomfortable made for a disappointing morning. Three-and-a-half
hours later we arrived.
We got off the bus in Yanqing and got a taxi to the gorge.
The roads were empty – something I hadn’t seen since arriving in China. There
was quite literally no one around which made it exquisitely peaceful. Then the
taxi driver stopped and said that he couldn’t take us any further. Luckily we
didn’t have to walk the remaining distance up the mountain roads as a man on a
motorbike said he’d take us the rest of the way for ¥10 (about £1), a very fair
and reasonable price to be propelled from a motorbike without any safety gear. Recent weather had been very hot, but this wasn’t the
case in Yanqing. It was surprisingly chilly and by the time we’d gotten to the
gorge on the back of the bike I was freezing. I was seriously considering
buying a scarf, which seemed mad considering temperatures had reached 38°C only
a few days before.
We had finally made it to the gorge. We took an escalator up
the mountain, which I now think is definitely preferable to walking up.
We got aboard the boat that would take us along the snaking
Gucheng River between the beautiful rocks. The scenery was truly magnificent,
and the tour guide explained the history of the local area, or so Eunju told me
anyway.
Further down the river and we were off the boat. At this pit
stop were many exciting things that I was not in the mood for.
There were opportunities to go kayaking through the gorge,
bungee jump off the top of one, or relax in a Buddhist temple. One way they
tried to persuade people to do such adrenaline fuelled idiocies was to play
very loud techno music. I suppose the logic is to play up beat music to get
your blood pumping, and excited to make a mistake such as jumping off a 50m
gorge with shoddy Chinese equipment. It didn’t quite have that effect on me.
Instead my stomach had just about given up and I was
bordering on vomiting. Between the boat ride, the loud awful techno music, and
the smell of burning incense from the nearby temple I was fully expecting to
see the remains of my last meal. I was feeling terrible and was 4-5 hours away
from the sanctuary of my bed. I wandered through the temple grounds and started to wonder if there would be anything more disrespectful than vomiting on a Buddhist monument. I managed to hold it together.
There was nothing else to do but make the slog of a journey
back to Beijing feeling nauseous. I spent the rest of the day and the following
morning between my toilet and my bed.
I was due back at work the following afternoon and got hit
by a car on my commute to work. Not a bad accident, but enough of a hit to
knock me off my bicycle.
It was not a good few days in the life of Brendan Fennell.
