From Al Karel, Santa Monica, CA

We just returned from our trip and all agree that our day with you was the very best part of the entire trip. Your pickup and return service was perfectly on time. The trip through the countryside to the Wall was an important and excellent part of the trip. We learned a great deal from your comments. You are a very pleasant and friendly person. The section of the Wall we hiked with you was spectacular. We walked in and around ten separate towers, some spectacularly built on mountain crests with incredible views of the other towers off into the distance. The hike back to the car went through small local villages. Then, what a wonderful surprise. A stop at a "trout resort" where we netted a fat and tasty trout which was prepared on the spot and served with our choice of vegetables and drink. We went to many restaurants during our vacation but remember that meal as the best and freshest. We give your service and your tour absolute number 1 rating. Whenever we talk about our trip, your Great Wall trip is mentioned first.
Email: arkarel@gmail.com
Al Karel
Santa Monica, CA

From Bernard Rosenberg; Sarasota, Florida USA

I had the opportunity to utilize the guided services of Wang Ping during July of 2005. That summer was my first trip to China, and had it not been for his organization and skills, I never would have made to a remote section of the Great Wall on my own. He led me to a fantastic journey and I savored every moment of it.

Unguided adventures in this region can’t be done on your own. Traffic is a nightmare, remote lodgings are unadvertised, and maps to the way up and down simply aren’t in print. The only way you get it is through someone in the know, and that’s why I chose Wang.

Wang’s English is good, his driving skills are satisfactory, and his knowledge about the wall is terrific. He was punctual in picking me up and very caring throughout the entire trip. He absolutely knows his way around, and this was evident from the very start to the very end. I felt secure with him, and he was worth every cent of what I paid.

There is only one word to describe my overall experience and that word is intimate. I had a Chinese guide, stayed in a Chinese setting, ate Chinese food, met Chinese friends, and climbed a Chinese piece of history. Throughout it all I felt special and privileged, and I didn’t even see another Westerner. This was local immersion at its finest.

And as far as being on the Great Wall goes I must say that it left me breathless. It is an astounding feeling knowing that you are climbing onto one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World that has been left for the modern traveler. My feeling of accomplishment in doing this trip will never leave me, and I’ll brag about forever. It simply was that good.

Thanks Wang.

Feel free to use me as reference, and anyone can reach me at alaskanauthor@comcast.net ,

You will always be my favorite China Guy!

Bernard Rosenberg : Author , Teacher ,Architect and Electronic Fishing Lurer evolution designer .

His fishing product website : www.electronicfishinglures.com .

His book website: www.alaskaauthor.com

His poem The odor of sarasota house 20080116

Step on the great wall , flower and trees boom on the great wall

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The Flight Above Heaven’s Ladder

A tale of passage onboard Continental’s 777 Business First service to China.

Bernard R. Rosenberg

Introduction

If anyone would have told me several months ago that I would be arranging my own business trip to China and fly it in the grandest style of any air traveler, I would have told them that they were out of their well-wishing and best-of-luck minds. I’m just a little guy. I don’t come from cooperate sponsorship, I’m not heir to a family fortune, and I’m not sponsored by private investors. To anyone, consider me to be just average for I represent an ordinary traveler who usually winds up in coach class service. But extraordinary circumstances led me to Beijing, and extraordinary circumstances led me to Business First. In all, it is an account worth telling.

By profession I am a teacher. As I began to enter my third decade of instruction my interest in new opportunities expanded. First I became an author and entered the world of publication. Second I became a product distributor and entered the world of business. Both grew so well that I soon realized it was time to follow the trail of these successes to their origins. A Chinese printer waited to publish a second book on my own, and a Chinese business associate waited to meet me so that we could further evolve our product line. In short, I determined that expanded opportunity was on the other side of the world and that I needed to get there in a hurry. I knew nothing about current international travel and I had not crossed the seas by air for over 25 years.

Business First is designed for those who wish to do business in China and arrive refreshed. Whether it is the responsibilities of the executive, or the hopes of the tourist, you will arrive in China relaxed and full of life. Continental knows this and has designed the opportunity of traveling in Business First because of this. For me, I counted on it. I had only 6 days to negotiate a private publication, expand a product line, tour 2 factories, meet and present gifts to my Chinese associate and family, discover Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, shop for gifts for my wife and friends, and overnight in a farmhouse in order to climb a remote segment of the Great Wall known as Heaven’s Ladder the following day. That’s plenty for anyone. It is little wonder that I now sought out the best in transportation in order for me to achieve the same in accomplishments.

How I appreciate my wife, for it was she who suggested that I use some of her air miles to reach Beijing. With my commitment hurried, I determined the best carrier who could support my plans was Continental. It was the same airline of those 25 years ago who now had a new scheduled service to a place I had never been. And due to my late planning by the time I ticketed all I could secure was coach class service. But during the reservation process the ticketing agent gave me some excellent advice,“Keep trying, maybe something in Business First will open up!” And with only 30, A Chinese traveler reflects on beauty as she stands on a pinnacle of the Great Wall

minutes before my scheduled departure from Florida to New York it did become available, and I gladly took it.

Flight

As a traveler I have at times treated myself to first class transportation via roads, rails, sea, and sky. Though I had heard of Continental’s elite service, I knew nothing about it. Thirteen hours of flying was ahead of me, and I needed amenities, quality, and service. When I stepped onboard in New York and departed, I entered a level of travel that excelled in all three.

Amenities: There are almost too many to count but by far the biggest player is your seat. Just as the flight crew pilots the aircraft, so do you pilot where you sit. Individual seat position controls allow you to engineer 22 inches of plush fabric width and technology to upright, cradled, or fully extended positions. At a touch of a button you can steer this marvel to conform to the comfort of your back, legs, and feet. It reclines 170 degrees and stretches out 6.5 feet. A private entertainment and communications center with 17 channels is built into it, and even your reading light swings to provide dual-level illumination. Beyond that you are given a travel pouch of almost a dozen personal necessities. Add in a catalog of in-flight duty free shopping with 94 items. Include magazines and newspapers of your choice. Toss in a menu that will include appetizers, full meals, executive work options, light meals, sky snacks, and mid-flight refreshments that total well over 100 selections. Only 46 passengers make it into this elite zone that is serviced continually by 6 flight attendants.
　
Quality: Be assured you can rate these amenities with 5 stars. There are 2 cabins in Business First supported by 3 galleys and 4 lavatories and the entire configuration is white glove spotless. The technology that supports your seat and communications center is easy to use and performs flawlessly. The food is excellent and quite simply rivals the finest of any restaurant. This is as good as it gets and you are in it.
　
Service: I’ve saved the best for last. All of these amenities are introduced and serviced by the finest flight attendants in the fleet. Years of experience are required for them to make it where you temporarily reside, and they pamper your every whim with style and a smile. Their expertise in attentiveness is clearly superior.

Perhaps I can best describe the flight by repeating to you what was said to me by my seated companion as we were outbound. She was an anthropologist who was celebrating her birthday with the gift of Business First and this was her first time. “Bernard,” she proclaimed, “This is the only way to go. I’ll never fly coach again!”

Summary

China is now ranked 3^rd in global production of manufactured goods and in 2008 the eyes of the world will be on Beijing as host of the Olympic Games. Travel demand is destined to only increase and Continental Airlines has designed this service with you in mind. Even the flight number of 88 was deliberately chosen because each figure represents the luckiest number in Chinese culture. Good fortune will smile on you twice each time you come and go.

When I returned outbound I realized this was true. All my goals, I accomplished. And I was now seated next to a Continental executive who offered me the opportunity for this article that I now share with you. And in our many conversations he revealed that Continental identifies its employees numerically in status and that the CEO who reaches the top rung of the cooperate ladder is recognized as number 60.

Believe me, as I looked thousands of feet below at that other ladder I had climbed only days before, I realized that Business First had now assigned this lucky passenger as number 61…

about the author

Bernard R. Rosenberg resides in Sarasota, Florida with his wife Gail. He is employed by the School District of Sarasota as a fine arts instructor. He is author of Alaska Fishing on a Budget and is soon to publish Kodiak Fishing at Any Angle. Bernard is also the USA distributor of Beijing AiPu Fishing Tackle Factory located in China. E-mail at www.alaskanauthor@comcast.net.

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Hi Wang,

Thank you very much for the photo's you e-mailed me.

Thank you also for the time on the Wall. I really did enjoy myself.

Maybe one day you will come to New Zealand and I can show you some of the mountains and scenery here. I may also return to China sometime. So let's keep in contact. I would love to see your fishing pond over the internet when it is finished!!!

Kind Regards,

Phil

Story in Cargo Distributing Center

ME AND THE MONK
by Bernard R. Rosenberg

In July in Beijing I went to the industrialized section of the city with my Chinese associate to retrieve a delivery of some ordered items. The truck was late and we waited in the shipper's office for a couple of hours until it arrived. Beijing in mid-summer is unmercifully hot. I had stripped myself bare the waist and a sweat towel hung around my neck. That was my standard way of handling the China heat. Chinese men did much the same, except they would untuck their t-shirts and curl them upwards just below their shoulders. All of us sweated, and the upper bareness of the common man was standard fare.

Industrial sections in China are rough; they are 2nd world with 3rd world accents. Trash is everywhere, and through the stench we walked up rickety and rusty metal stairs past outdoor cookers tended by workers and made our way through the smoke and aroma of burnt pork and singed chicken to the shipper's office. There was a tiny desk, a couple of chairs, a small TV, and files and invoices stacked from the floor to the ceiling. A sleeping man was laying on a beat-up sofa wearing nothing but just a pair of pajama bottoms. I observed he was small, fat, and bald; a typical Buddha except not gold and a cross-legged seated statue. Instead, this was a slumbering Chinaman who had just awoke from his nap.

I was introduced through translation, and he took an immediate fascination with my bare chest. Chinese men don't have any hair on their chests. He ran his hands through mine several times.

We exchanged smokes (I don't want to hear it), and our conversations were quite lively and political. Government talk is taboo in China and I was very surprised to be engaged in it. His talk with me, a Westerner, was the first he had ever had. He was genuinely interested and we ran our conversations beyond typical tourist. He reveled in the hour's talk, and to compliment me, he told my associate he would read my palm if I accepted his overture.

I was told this man was a Buddhist and that this was a great honor. I accepted. He pointed to the sofa and there the man from the East began to examine the man from the West. He took my left hand into both of his, and then from fingertip to forearm studied every line, nook, and cranny in complete silence for over 5 minutes. He caressed my entire arm and even placed his palm on my belly and gently pushed it. He then spoke.

"You have overcome a great sickness from within. What has been cut from your body would surely have killed you and you will die from it unless you continue to be helpful to your fellow man. If the spirit that has discovered you now remains, you will live. If it leaves because you do not follow it, you will live no longer."

He knew nothing about me, let alone my past, my surgery, and my medical history. I was dumbfounded. How could he have ever known and how could he have ever been so assuredly Asian correct?

There is no ending to the tale. Just this story that is remarkably true...

Barry , Carol and Douglas Trip On Sep 18th 2006.

A historical journey to the wild and tranquil great wall , apart from crowded city and tourist great wall and enjoy our own wild wall .

Great Wall Essay.

The wall impacted the Chinese populace in two ways; it protected them from the outside and it kept them on the inside. The result was the perpetuation of an isolated society with the largest population on Earth. Managed from within, locked from within, and protected by all, ancient rulers could literally control the mentality of the many simply due to the capture of the wall. When the rulers vanished and communism flourished, this same dogma of isolation continued. It has been this way for centuries, and it was not until the visit of an American president, Richard Nixon, that the Chinese people ever had a sniff of what they were missing. New China leaders have since emerged, and they recognize that the time of their country has now come. The wall is now but a gateway to a society of great treasures, superior culture, and energetic people.

The country is now connected to the world via the Internet, and though still a communistic state, captitaislm is on the rise, encouraged, and continues to flourish. By the time your daughter graduates, Mandrian Chinese will be taught in school systems worldwide, and by the time she is your age, the automobile produced in China will be #1 in world sales. It is inevitable. Nothing will ever out-pace the Chinese simply due to their numbers. They have gone global and will continue until they become the world's largest producer of all manufactured goods.

The Great Wall has changed little since it's constuction. What has been done in rennovation is primarialy for the tourist and the world view. Those pristine posters you see of beautiful sculptured paths with few persons are carefully orchestrated by the government. In fact, those areas are extremely crowded with hundreds of persons who become a massive wave of walkers that are hawked by any free enterprise the Chinese can dream up to make money. It is packed, littered, and persons openly have to resort to find a secret spot for their personal relief due to limited sanitation facilites.

The areas of disrepair are many. The wall has been shook by earthquakes, ravished by weather, and plundered by thieves for centurties. Brick has been removed for constuction of homes, and archelogical treasures ripped off for sales to collectors. It is so massive it is impossible to protect, but in the same breath, its very own size perpetuates it existence. You can see it from space, the world's largest crawling cemertary, lined with the hundreds of thousands of workers who died building it and are layered into the packed sand, brush, and mud that form the inner core for its outer walls. It is one the wonders of the ancient world and it will continue to surrive, a testament to the strength of the Chinese people.

No trip to China is complete without a visit to the Great Wall. If you are lucky, perhaps you will get to experience it under the direction of a Chinese guide to one of its more remote sections. Consider that your good fortunate. Even if you have to go into the rennovated tourist area, you should not forsake this experience. Do not ever miss this journey into a path of the history of this world...

Bernard R. Rosenberg

Great Wall Visitor

Remote Zone; Summer 2005

beijing 3: the great wall of sticky rice by Doug Benson

At 7 AM on Saturday, Justin and I are met by Wang Ping, our guide to a remote and wild section of the Great Wall known as Jiankou, about 200 kilometers and 3 hours from our hotel. Ping has brought a friend, an attractive young woman of an uncertain name. After asking her to pronounce her name twice and then spell it for me, I give up, blame the road noise, and write down “Angie???”

As we drive outward through the expansive Beijing suburbs, signs exhort us to “Don’t follow too clowsely.” Scattered chimneys from countless small factories attest to the ongoing lack of pollution controls, and belch thick clouds of off-white smoke that spreads out into a solid stripe lying low over the fields, a horizontal band of milky haze below the treetops.

The air has a smoky wood smell.

The major highways look just like the ones in California, though perhaps with fewer potholes. Similar signage, tollbooths, road construction. The main roads show evidence of a large labor pool: the medians are well groomed, manicured and planted with bright flowers.

Ping speaks English well, having learned from an American teacher, a 24 year old named Christine. He describes her thusly: “Christine is same as you are, with very big nose.”“Oh,” I said, laughing. “You mean she was very beautiful!”

Getting to the Jiankou section of the Great Wall entails taking a series of ever smaller roads past rivers and countryside villages. Ping points out the resorts, which appear to be constantly under construction. Apparently this is a popular region to escape to on hot summer weekends.

As the roads narrow, we pass groups of people digging up the discolored but otherwise perfect bricks that line the road, replacing them with whiter versions of the same bricks. I suppose this is the Chinese equivalent of the Works Progress Administration back in the 1930′s in the U.S.: keep the people employed.

We wind through the mountains past corn-growing farming communities. Occasionally we are charged small tolls to pass through these villages, women and children moving makeshift barriers to let us through after being given the requisite small bills. Apart from corn, this forms a large part of the village income, and so is tolerated by the local authorities despite the signs we now see proclaiming “This section of the Great Wall is not open to the public.”

Apparently, the payment of the toll makes us private, not public. Ping explains that the signs were put there after the villages got sued by the family members of people who died. Hiking the wall. Where we’re going.

“Ah,” I say. “Perhaps you should have mentioned that earlier.”

“Don’t worry,” replies Ping. I wait for more words of reassurance, but he seems to have reached the end of that particular thought.

We reach a small village in the mountains at the literal end of the road, where Ping’s van is argued over by an insistent woman and a creaky old man, each of whom wants our business at their respective parking areas, e.g. flat bits of dirt not otherwise occupied by cut corn stalks. The woman is quicker and louder, and the old man loses out.

At 3600 feet, Jiankou is one of the most picturesque sections of the Great Wall, rising and falling hundreds of feet in successive sharp peaks. Just getting to the wall is a hellacious climb up a steep trail from our small village, and I’m thankful for the loan of a walking stick from Ping. It takes the four of us about 45 minutes to climb the switchback trail. When we reach the Wall from the northern side of what used to be Mongolia, we can see the village back down in the valley, a thousand feet below.

The Jiankou section of the Great Wall is not restored like other better known and well-supported tourist sections. This is the real wall, a majestic and crumbling 600 years of history, crawling its way up and down over sharp and close set peaks like a line of paint laid over crumpled tinfoil. Each peak along the long-vanished border has its guard tower, no matter how steep the approach.

The base of the wall remains solid, even where trees have taken route. Some portions of the wall are broad and heavily forested. Other spots are thin and bare, straddling knife-edge ridges in the mountains where you can stretch from side to side and take long looks down to the left and right.

In most places, the side walls preventing an accidental fall remain intact, the hard white joints between the stones still displaying the incredible staying power of the sticky rice used in the mortar. Rice does not grow in these mountains, and would have been carried from the south of China upriver by barge, then by cart, then by hand. Some of that rice ended up in the stomachs of the builders, and some ended up ground into powder and mixed with water, lime or egg white. The builders and their meals are long gone, but the once glutinous rice remains centuries later, fossilized and still incredibly strong.

In the frequent spots where the wall climbs sharply and clings to the sides of mountain peaks you can see gravity and time slowly winning out, turning stone steps into dense piles of rubble that we must climb. Some of the sections are nearly vertical, requiring us to heave ourselves upward from stone to stone or climb the outside edge of the wall and push ourselves up on the twisted roots of trees.

As my shoulder bag flops around in an attempt to send me spinning downward I am reminded that a “man purse” filled with water bottles is not the most stable thing to carry. Had I known in advance I’d be doing this climb, I would have brought a small backpack. And some hiking boots. Hey, at least I remembered a hat. Ping tells me I look like Indiana Jones.

He also suggests I take off my clothes and hike the Great Wall naked, saying the resulting movie would get a lot of attention.

“You mean the kind of attention where I get arrested, thrown into a Chinese prison and never get seen again?”

“Oh no, it would be no problem. You would be famous.”

“Hmm. I think you’re confused in your English. There’s a difference between famous and infamous. Angelina Jolie is famous. Me being arrested for hiking naked at the Great Wall—that would be infamous.”

I am, however, quite tempted to drop trou’ and hike a section in the all-together. I wonder how Ping, who has only met me a few hours ago, could possibly know me so well. I swear upon my future grave, which I’m thinking could be any moment now, that he brought this up entirely on his own.

In the end, discretion and my fear of the authorities wins out, and I tell Ping that if it weren’t for the presence of a coworker, particularly one with a fancy camera, I would have gone for it.

“You would be very famous on YouTube,” he insists.

“You’re confusing me with my brother,” I say. “A lot of people get us mixed up. He’s a YouTube star. I just get naked on mountaintops. But not, I think, today.” Luckily for all concerned, we drop the topic, I keep the trousers, and we all hike onward.

For the next six hours we play the part of Ming dynasty guards and march up and down the steep mountain passes to stop, panting, at each ruined guard tower. On the tallest of these peaks, the aptly named “The Eagle Flies Upward” (which it would need to do in order to avoid smashing into the vertical cliff face), I find cell phone reception from the distant village far below, and call my wife!

I tell M where I am so she can look it up on the Internet, totally forgetting until after I hang up that she will find, right before she tries to go to bed, that Jiankou is described as dangerous, hazardous, risky, wild, and crumbly. All true, which makes it a wonderful place to visit. But perhaps not the best place to surprise a loved one on the other side of the world.

“Okay, I’ll call you later if I survive the day. Sleep well, sweetheart, and pleasant dreams!”

Although there were plenty of other hikers, we didn’t see another Western face the entire day. Jiankou is a place for intrepid travelers only, and I was thankful that we had a good guide. Wang Ping can be contacted at his website,

http://www.greatwall-alternative.com/

where he confusingly refers to himself as Mr. Dereck, the name given to him by his expatriate English teacher Christine, she of the brown hair and the beautifully large nose that looks just like mine.