Great Wall, great food
China’s culinary delights
Smoke billows out of the brightly lit stalls as sticks of all sorts sizzle on the hot plates. I’ve sniffed out (literally) the night markets in downtown Beijing in search of one thing – the scorpion, dusted in its secret Chinese spices.
Sweating vendors spruik their snacks to rows of passers-by – some offer charming smiles to land a sale, others wear an expression that shows how serious the heat is, and how long the hours are, in the open-air kitchens.
There’s a mix of locals and tourists hustling and bustling in the humid city air.
Some fill up on dumplings from the stacks of bamboo steamers, others pick the bean-filled sweet treats with cute little faces of bears and pigs. There’s seafood and meat and some random stuff I have never seen or smelt before.
I’m an adventurous eater and street stalls feel like home. The charred tentacles are tempting, I want to plough face first into the woks full of glistening fried noodles, stirred by chubby men in red visors. But sadly, I have a firstworld-traveller problem. I’ve feasted just hours earlier on more Peking Duck than any one lady has ever eaten.
Qujude Duck Restaurant is full of locals, our guide, Ray, tells us. They’re here to celebrate the end of the Dragon Boat Festival. The chefs working in the kitchen have spent two years learning how to become masters of this meat. The birds, Ray explains, all come from the same lake, not too far away, which has a ‘‘specific sweet flavour’’ – a pearl of wisdom he heard from his grandfather. At three months old the ducks are ready for our dinner.
In the kitchen the birds are hung on hooks to allow the fat to drip, turned and roasted at 273-degrees over apple, pear and peach bark chips. The whole hot golden bird is wheeled to our table where a stern looking chef arrives in his whites to carve it as we eagerly await around our lazy susan.
There’s six of us, mouths watering, cameras at the ready for the ceremony. Traditionally, each part of the duck is served to reflect status. The head (eyeball, beak and all) goes to the most important person. We don’t fight over it on our table of Kiwi travellers, but after a look and a sniff a few of us take a cautious nibble. In classic Chinese food fashion, nothing goes to waste. The menu features all sorts – mustard duck web, braised duck hearts, duck blood curd with tofu, duck gizzards, tongue – and all the bones are thrown into a broth for duck soup to start the celebratory meal. I might be adventurous, but I’m not keen on all the insides. What we’re fighting for are the plates of perfectly cooked duck breast and crispy skin – one cleverly (and kind of comically) crafted into a peony, the national flower of China.
I use my chopsticks to place the meat in paper-thin pancakes and spread on some rich, sweet and sticky hoisin sauce with fronds of cucumber. Wrapping it up, I snaffle one after another, stopping in between only to munch on crispy skin and sip my refreshing crate bottle of the local beer – Tsingtao.
Earlier in the day I’d worked up this marathon appetite – I’d hiked a 7km stretch of the Great Wall of China, barely a freckle of this wonder of the world that snakes for more than 21,000km, according the to most recent measurement in 2009.
The Great Wall is the longest man-made structure in the world and reaches from Dandong in the east to Lop Lake in the west, roughly snaking something that resembles the southern edge of inner Mongolia. Despite what you may have heard, it cannot be seen from space, but it’s impressive, nonetheless.
Our trek takes off in the Jinshanling section, about a threehour drive northeast of the capital. We arrived the night before our tramp, just in time to dash up to a vantage point for sunset on the Great Wall. Speed walker Ray kindly lugs up a chilly bin containing a couple of bottles of French Champagne on ice.
We fill our flutes, salute sundown and take selfies while soaking it all in. I get one of those travel highs I sometimes get, you might know them, when you feel so overwhelmed and grateful for where you are.
High on life, we head back down to the town of Gubeikou at the foot of the landmark, a popular spot for tourists tackling the Great Wall.
This province is walking distance to the photogenic Gubei Water Town, an exact replica of China’s ancient, and more famous, Wuzhen Water Town. Its canals, nooks and crannies are well worth a night time wander – colourful lanterns line the roof of oriental houses, archways and bridges are lit up for exploring, and my eyes follow a strip of lights lining the top of the mountains in the distance, a reminder of how close we are to an epic adventure in the morning.
I’d expected air thick with pollution in China. And while the skies certainly don’t compare with the blissful blue you see on a postcard sent from Aotearoa, they weren’t as bleak as I expected. I could breathe easy and the outlook wasn’t drab – Ray did say we had a good day for it.
Ray’s optimism, enthusiasm and quirky hat with flaps made him a valuable guide, as did his local insight that freed us from trudging the usual tourist trail.
We had to climb more than 1000 stairs through the bush before we first planted a foot on the actual Great Wall of China. We were escorted here – and for kilometres more – by two local women, their feet in flash new Nikes and calf muscles bulging from the hard yards they climb every day to try to make a sale to the tourists who take this route during the off-season.
Their diligence paid off – I and one other in my squad paid 25 Chinese yuan (about $5) for a paper fan, that, despite everyone’s jest, made it home without a tear.
These characters added colour to my Great Wall experience.
There was also the one-eyed man, skin like leather, sitting on a wall selling Coca-Cola to parched tourists, a couple of Chinese chaps walking around with T-shirts tucked up to expose their belly (a common sight on hot days), and what appeared to be a family with their toy poodle, enjoying a can of beer and a sandwich near the Great Wall gondola entry.
To my surprise, and that of others who admired my gallery of images, there wasn’t one other tourist tarnishing my photographs of the landmark. The only person in any of my pics is my intimate posse – capturing classics like jumping in mid-air and sitting on a ledge looking out, pondering.
The five-hour tramp was filled with flutters of the warm fuzzy feelings I’d had the night before. Being there was way beyond any of the pictures I had seen on Google. Parts of the wall were built as far back as the 7BC and while not much of this original structure remains intact, it’s still shrouded with history that makes the head spin. As I walk, sometimes with tiny steps down steep uneven slopes clinging to the arm of an elderly escort, I poke my head through peep holes and around corners. I imagine the invaders on their horses that this massive structure was built to defend against.
Ray explains how it was erected over about 2000 years, originally by the Qin Dynasty; about 20 per cent of China’s population were recruited to build it at that time, many dying in the difficult conditions. Here I am today, curious, sweating and a bit dusty, treading on their hard work in my trainers. (Fun fact: Walking shoes are advised, but one Kiwi in my group insisted on wearing Jandals. He became the first person to complete a Great Wall hike in ‘‘slippers’’, the locals said.)
I rode the gondola back to the Jinshanling carpark tired but triumphant. At the end of the three-hour return drive to Beijing I knew I would be filling my belly with a dozen duck pancakes. And for dessert, a scorpion on a stick.