From the hutongs of Beijing to the majesty of the Great Wall, driving in China is a culture shock for Gavin Conway.

Beijing central is not a place you’d want to get out of the car and walk around. It’s not that it doesn’t feel safe – I have never felt so secure in any city centre in the world – it’s just that it isn’t on a particularly human scale.

You will never, though, forget that you are in China. The bicycle lanes are wider than most streets in European cities, crowded with commuters on ‘Flying Pigeon’ bicycles, and tricycles transporting anything from coal bricks to piles of textiles. Car traffic and pedestrians blend into one chaotic thrash at intersections, with margins of error reduced to millimetres, an orchestra of car horns overlaying the cackle and pop of a thousand tiny moped engines.

And on the car's radio – FM1 – Uptown Girl plays at us without a hint of irony.

I pick my way through oppressive traffic to the district of Hohai. Battling through an intersection of apocalyptic chaos, I break out onto a boulevard that neatly defines the dichotomy of Beijing’s headlong rush into western modernity. On the right side of the boulevard, a massive concrete apartment building awaits finishing amid a forest of cranes. But to the left sprawls a series of low, one-story structures connected by narrow, winding alleyways that break out into courtyards, themselves littered with the paraphernalia of domestic life. The tang of coal smoke hangs in the bitingly cold air over this place, obviously ancient and absolutely teeming with society. In an instant, I have travelled from a boomtown of steel and glass towers to a place that puts me eyeball to eyeball with Chinese culture centuries old. It’s quite a shock.

These are the hutuongs. Translating literally to ‘streets and lanes’, the hutongs are where Chinese families cooperate in a tight social network, where you can glimpse lives being lived through the tangle of courtyards and alleys Conditions in the hutongs are pretty rough, and over the decades the big and characterless apartment blocks that cover most of central Beijing have gradually replaced them. Reliable heat and plumbing versus the charm and scale of the hutongs - it’s an easy choice if you’re a tourist, but not so simple if you have to live here.

And then, in a place famous for crowded chaos, the most perfect solitude. The lake at Hohai is frozen, and even though they’re not supposed to, men come here to fish though holes hacked through the ice. In the frozen semi-gloom of a winter’s afternoon, a temple is silhouetted against the far shore, and muffled by the icy fog, the sound of men enjoying each other’s company. Two young lovers perform a romantic skating routine, without the skates, and in the quiet, I realise that most walkers on the shore are humming to themselves as they pass.

Further along, I come across a group of men having a bit of a swim in a large opening cut into the ice. An assembly of curious ducks looks on. And the most surprising thing about the scene is just how natural it looks. Of course they’re swimming, why ever wouldn’t they be?

Later that night I make my way down to the Beijing’s night scene to confirm what I already know about young China. Neon pulses throughout Jin Ba Jie Street – literally ‘Bar Street’ – as I wander past, among others, the CD Café, the Scream Bar, Hotspot Disco and the endearingly tagged Keep in Touch Bar. Inside, teenagers strike the familiar pout-and-glower pose while up on stage, female artists cover Adele or deliver pining Chinese lyrics which you just know are about love and loss. As always.

The next day the temperature plummets as I drive northwest out of Beijing central. Soon, I am reduced to a cautious crawl on a modern four-lane motorway, now shrouded with gently falling snow. Ignoring an overhead gantry which announces the ‘overtaking lane’ – unusually signed in English – I take a slip road that leads down to a massive parking lot. Leaving the car behind, I begin the long walk to a castellated and overly-grand entrance. Along the way, I’m assailed by China’s sidewalk market economy – I am offered hats made of rabbit, Chairman Mao badges, little red books, gloves, more hats made of indeterminate fur and, inexplicably, a kite made in the image of a fighter jet.

I stumble forth, trapped in an impenetrable communications bubble the like of which I’ve never encountered – it’s all part of the tremendous cultural jolt that awaits the China-novice. Addresses carefully written down during those smugly made travel preparations are rendered useless until translated into Chinese script, itself impossibly difficult to decode, even as a simple visual symbol. Street signs are rendered meaningless, as are a myriad of importunings, warnings, advices and the general ebb and flow of public pronouncement. It’s like being deprived of one of your senses.

And then there I am. The Great Wall of China, some 4,000 miles long and 2,300 years old and one of few man made structures visible from the moon. Indeed, the scale of it – social, historical, physical – is almost unimaginable.

But here, today, the scale is mostly human. Coated in frost with a close, dense fog reducing the immensity and echo of it, I join lines of Chinese day-trippers on a trek along the Wall’s steep ramparts. A thin coating of ice has people falling and sliding, taking out other clusters of trekkers like nine-pin bowls. And it’s here that I enjoy my first genuine social contact – it is the international, unifying language of falling over and then laughing your face off about it. At the moment, I am fluent. It is the open-faced smiles and proffered helping hands that I remember, the first tiny clues to a nation comfortable in its own skin, especially in the face of large, bearded foreigners such as myself.

The motorway carries me back to Beijing, now clear enough for to cruise at the 60mph limit. Soon, I am on the incredibly broad and straight avenues that define urban Beijing. Tall, hyper-modern buildings with the vast swathes of pale glass and marble columns so beloved of Las Vegas-style hotels dominate the skyline. Hoardings surround me with the brands that have come to signify western affluence: Nokia, Panasonic, Ikea, Microsoft, KFC, MacDonalds. Around us on these broad avenues, more evidence of burgeoning wealth as sleek black Audi A6s, Mercedes Benz S-Classes and BMW 7-Series shark past impressively.  

China. Not so foreign after all.

Words Gavin Conway Twitter | Instagram

ROADBOOK

CLASS: Wonder of the World

NAME: Beijing to the Great Wall of China

ROUTE: Beijing to Juyongguan

COUNTRY: China

DISTANCE: 40 miles