Expats brave local bureaucracy for outdoor weekend adventures

Expats in Beijing are an “indoorsy” crowd. Take a moment to think about your friends in the city. Pat yourself on the back if you have seen more than three-quarters of them in natural light. It’s not our fault. Beijing is hardly built for outdoor adventure. Much of the tourism industry is still in its crapping-the-diapers infancy, and no bao’an passes up the opportunity to say, “No, you can’t camp there.”

“(At the Great Wall), we had to hike for an hour and a half and climb up a sketchy turret to find a safe spot, because locals and police will prevent you from camping,” says bon vivant Steve Webb.

I dealt with similar issues on a May Holiday jaunt to Shi Du, a scenic spot southwest of Beijing which offers a not-so-rare combo of beautiful vistas and bungee-jumping commercial sprawl. We found a campsite a few kilometers up from a resort and had only just begun congratulating ourselves on our naturalist virtue, when the manager of the resort came ambling up. He informed us that just down the hill was a new resort with a swimming pool, KTV, and bowling alley that would suit our camping needs much better. Having failed to convince us, he returned sometime later with a local police captain who also explained how much nicer it would be to go camping in one of the resort suites. He was mollified only when we agreed to sign contracts promising not to libel the resort in the press.

Still, neither run-ins with the authorities nor the realization of how terrible you look in sunlight take away from the experience of camping. “People forget that it’s possible to escape the urban sprawl,” said China International Business editor, Kit Gillet. “Once in a while, you need reminding that there are actually stars in the sky.” For the libertine Webb, camping is more than escape. “I think it restores a romance to the Wall that gets lost when you go during the day and are bombarded with offers for warm Qingdao and ‘I climbed the Great Wall’ T’s.”

Jonathan Haagen