|
|
|
09.01.08
Outside Beijing, another worldAside from the obligatory trip to the Great Wall, visitors to Beijing
rarely stray much beyond the Second Ring Road, although the
municipality encompasses 6,500 square miles.
There are mountains to the north and west, with reservoirs, hot springs
and sleepy villages. To the south and east, farm fields take over,
supplying Beijing with peaches, strawberries, cherries and watermelons
in season.
Only recently have more Beijingers, enabled by new SUVs, touring bikes
and camping gear, begun venturing outside the city. Last year, while
studying Mandarin at a Beijing university for four months, I often
joined the weekend exodus, with the help of tour agencies and clubs
that specialize in excursions around greater Beijing.
My ventures convinced me that seeing the city beyond the Sixth Ring
Road, currently its widest concentric circle, should be high on the
wish list for visitors before, during or after the 2008 Summer Olympics.
My favorite weekend trips were with Beijing Hikers , founded in 2001
and dedicated to helping people, especially English-speaking tourists
and expatriates (anyone can come, though), discover what there is to
see beyond the Sixth Ring Road. Hikes can be easy saunters suitable for
families or tough, long, steep climbs on wild sections of the Great
Wall.
I did the three-mile Silver Pagoda Loop on a beautiful spring morning.
The countryside through which our bus passed had the same well-worn
feeling as much of rural China, and small towns looked half-deserted,
drained by the gravitational pull of the city.
We started from the pretty hamlet of Haizi, which has a 300-year-old
opera stage, tucked deep in the mountains of Changping County .
Leader Huijie Sun took about 30 people on the Silver Pagoda Loop hike.
As she walked, she tied scraps of red cloth to tree branches to make
sure people behind her didn't lose their way. We crossed a ridge and
passed an abandoned quarry en route to the top of Silver Mountain.
The summit affords a fine view of the pagoda park in the valley below,
where many of the Buddhist temples date from the Jin Dynasty (1115 to
1234) .
Another weekend, I booked a getaway at Mountain Yoga , a retreat in an
old villa about a two-hour drive northwest of the city. The retreat van
met me at the entrance of the Beijing Botanical Garden, where the flat,
densely packed city yields to the Fragrant Hills .
From there, we threaded our way along country roads to Beianhe village,
at the gate of Dajue Temple . The beautifully renovated temple compound
has imperial steles dating to the Liao Dynasty (907 to 1125), ancient
magnolia trees and an elegant teahouse.
Mountain Yoga is just down a dirt road from the temple, surrounded by a
stout wall and guarded by two big, shaggy mutts. The courtyard complex
where I stayed had sloping tile roofs, overhanging eaves, colorfully
painted lintels and intricately mullioned windows. Beyond that, the
retreat was rustic, with old carved stones strewed across the grounds
and an empty fish pond. The guest rooms around the courtyard were buggy
and had little more than fans and beds.
I practiced asanas, yoga postures that are the same in China or Los
Angeles , under a colossal ginkgo in the courtyard, led by Xiao Jo, a
young Chinese yoga instructor who had come out from the city. She
didn't speak English, and my Chinese was limited, so we communicated
mostly in the universal body language of yoga during two classes a day
plus meals, which were taken in a dining hall overlooking the vegetable
garden from which most of our organic food came. I read and napped the
rest of the time and figured myself lucky to have spent about $125 for
a weekend that left me feeling as if I had awakened from a deep sleep.
When I cast about for other ways to get out of the city, I found the
Chinese Culture Club , a local tour company that has a packed schedule
of excursions, including Great Wall hikes, calligraphy courses and
cruises on the old imperial canal linking central Beijing to the Summer
Palace. I chose a bus trip to Songzhuang Artists Community, about an
hour east of the city.
Songzhuang grew up in 1994, when three Chinese artists, squeezed by
high rents and government pressure in the aftermath of the Tiananmen
Square protests, left their enclave in northwestern Beijing. The
farming village they chose as a new home has since burgeoned, drawing
about 2,000 young artists to newly built quarters that have plenty of
light and studio space.
Now Songzhuang looks more like a suburb than a pastoral idyll and has a new museum dedicated to contemporary Chinese art.
Other than during the fall Songzhuang festival, the village is not open
to the public, but the Chinese Culture Club arranged studio visits for
the group. So we saw, among other things, massive, abstract cityscapes
that were the signature works of painter Zhao Dewei.
Hikes and excursions such as these kept me sane and centered in
Beijing. They also reminded me that, mushrooming though the city may
be, it remains linked to the surrounding countryside, where you can
still sit, listening to bird song, on the base of a pagoda.
Susan Spano |Los Angeles Times
|
|
|
|
