TIANXIANYU, China - The old widower warned me about the fish. If only I had listened.
I fell in conversation with this woman, whose name I never caught, because she had the smart idea to create makeshift seats in the middle of a near-vertical pitch of trail. The path leads from a parking lot up to the Jiankou section of the Great Wall, a tortorus mile and a half that ends with a scramble up a handmade ladder.
The view from the top is fantastic, and the Great Wall here is crumbling and largely unrestored. Coming to section like this (there are many) is much preferable tramping around Badaling, the completely rebuilt and hawker-filled section close to Beijing.
After the steep hike up and the equally steep journey back down, I happily took the old woman up on her offer of a seat in a make-shift mountain shop.The woman had carefully placed newsprint over a few flat stones, put up a thin canvas tarp, and sold drinks to passing hikers. She charges 6 RMB for a bottle of water, and 8 RMB for tea or coke -- about a 400% markup from the bottom of the mountain.
While I didn't get her name, I did find out the woman had two children, one studying to be a lawyer, the other in school, is widowed, and moved to the village just a few years ago. She spent a great deal of time explaining to me which characters were in the village's name, first by saying what words they were in "tian as in field," then drawing them in the dirt with a stick. By the time my first friend showed up at the drink station, it was very clear that we were near the village of 田仙鱼, and not say, in 天线与 (these would have the same romanizations).
Then the woman decided ask a couple questions. Naturally, the first our nationality, and after that what we were doing after the hiking. Eating, I replied. The woman then gave me some advice. The people at the bottom of the mountain were cheaters, she said. You would order an eight pound fish, and then they'd swipe for it for a two pound one but charge you for the larger amount. Be careful, she said.
I thanked for her advice, bought a bottle of her overpriced water and headed down the mountain. Thirty minutes later we arrived, dirty, sore, and quite hungry. Rather than charge admission to their section of the wall, the residents of Tianxianyu have placed a large resident specializing in fish at the wall's access point. The fish are kept in several large outdoor concrete tanks, and visitors are encouraged to catch their dinner, which is then fried and served at a nearby table.
The loads of Chinese tourists (strangely not climbing the wall, just here for the food) should have been a clue that something was up. The ridiculous idea of casting a hook into a concrete bowl in order to catch dinner should have been another clue. And the fact that a woman who makes her living by over-charging tourists told me that they over-charged at this restaurant. Then there was our driver, egging us on by constantly saying, "The big here are really big! So big!"
Yes, the fish restaurant was a tourist trap.
They tried to charge us 15 RMB for soy sauce, 10 RMB for a bottle of water, and when asked recommendations only pointed to the most expensive things on the menu.
But the worst thing of all was the fish. We ordered a plate of smoked fish. Ten minutes later, two small fillets arrived, each well seasoned and quite tasty. I quite liked it, until I saw the bill. The tiny pieces of fish amounted to 2.5 斤, or nearly three pounds of fish. I'm quite convinced the staff actually did switch out the fish, giving us a smaller fish but charging for a big one.
So please, come out here, expierence the Great Wall in a pretty natural setting, but for God's sake, listen to the old widower when she warns you about the fish.
