The Ole Rock Climbing and Mountaineering Center is almost finished. The climbing wall is being repainted by an artist.
The floor of the bouldering room is just finished. I love the one piece mat hand made to fit around the bouldering wall. No more twisted ankles because of overlapping mats or gaps in the mats 🙂
The progress of the indoor climbing wall and bouldering place is amazing. Just a few weeks ago it was just an idea to open a place for rock climbing in Beijing during the winter and now it is almost finished. The bouldering place we all went to last year unfortunately closed in the spring and they now have a restaurant in there (but still kept the bouldering wall and all the grips on it).
My friends is the project manager for this climbing & mountaineering center project. It is in the Ole soccer facility near East 4th Ring Road. She showed me the progress of the climbing wall and the bouldering room. The experts from the Tibetean Mountaineering Association just arrived to set up the climbing routes and work in this center. I think the bouldering room is so beautiful.I can’t waittill it is opened for us to climb.
Beijing has the 798 Art district for contemporary art. But there are also some other places for contemporary art like near the 3rd ring road with some galleries and museums.
This was on the way to the new climbing wall. This will be Beijing’s biggest indoor climbing and bouldering wall. And from the first impression it will also be the best. It is located in the Ole Sports facility. Here is teh current status of the 10 meter tall climbing wall:
This room that is just getting prepared will be a huge bouldering room. That would be even bigger than the bouldering room Beijing had in 2004 (before the building it was inside had been torn down).
Sometimes you actually get the feeling of being in the countryside despite being inside Beijing 4th ring road:
What a beautiful Sunday. We spent most of the sunny day in the green park.
I have been working on a new artistic bicycle performance for the upcoming GREENing the BEIGE event. For that I needed cardboard cars and trucks as props. My younger Chinese climbing friends helped me paint the cars in the park. It was a team effort and great fun.
Finally I managed to sort through the pictures of our rock climbing holiday in Thailand. This was long ago but I still like the pictures. Thailand is a nice for escaping the cold weather of Beijing. And Krabi is a beautiful place to climb – it is the climbing spot of South-East Asia.
More interesting are the pictures with the wide angle lens. I just find it hilarious how it distorts faces.
When we flew to Thailand was just the time when there was the bad snow storm over Southern China. It covered 6 Southern provinces in snow creating a disaster. We actually saw the white fields (that is not clouds) of South China from the sky.
May 1st is always a public holiday in China. This year it was proposed to work on May 4th (Sunday) in order to get May 2nd (Friday) off. Most companies agreed to that suggestion. So 5 friends and me decided to go for a 3 day 2 night wild camping plus rock climbing weekend. Unfortunately I had to participate in the bicycle race in the morning of May 1st, so two of us took a long distance bus to get us out of Beijing and into the North near the new rock climbing site.
As it was the May 1st holiday also other people were traveling with buses. It was actually good that we took the bus in the afternoon as the mass of people had already arrived at their destinations and the queue to buy a bus ticket was shorter than we feared it would be.
We met the others who had set up the tents right in the small bee valley where other Beijing climbers had set up 30 new climbing routes late last year. It is beautiful rock with many more possibilities to be developed. If you have a close look at this picture you can see a tiny white dot in the middle of the cliff (slightly right of the center of this picture). That is Echo climbing one of the longest routes in this area.
The first morning the weather was okay. It was slightly overcast but very pleasant temperature. We had a big breakfast together on our private „camp ground“.
And then we went rock climbing. There were some really interesting routes. Some had overhangs – some were face – some had chimneys. It was a lot of fun. Click here to see all of the pictures of this trip.
We were looking forward to the next climbing day. That morning we had nice breakfast when suddenly very strong wind started. We just finished packing away the breakfast remainders when it started to rain. We waited and read books in our tents hoping the rain would stop soon. After a while we decided to wait for the rain to get less and then pack our things and head back to Beijing. Echo and her friend decided to wait in her car. When we had a look their tent had already flown away… So we packed up despite the rain and drove back. Friends who stayed in Beijing that day said that it was a big storm with hail.
The climbing wall in Ritan Park in Beijing is always a nice place to meet up for climbing routes as well as bouldering. Even if the weather is still a bit chilly there are always some fun people around.
And we do not only come here for climbing. Last Saturday we were trying to find many difficult Yoga postures and challenging each other. It turned out that some guys are much more flexible than others…
In 2008 China changed the public holidays to some more traditional days. One of these new Chinese public holidays is the „Tomb Sweeping“ day on April 5th where you should think of your ancestors. Many families gather together and burn money (fake money) for the family members that had passed away. And some families even go to the graveyards.
This year the Friday April 4th was the public holiday. We decided to join our Chinese climbing friends for a 2 day „Hike and Spa“ trip north of Beijing. We started at 6:30am in Beijing to avoid the Friday holiday traffic and arrived early near Changping in Mang Shan. After doing a tour of all the possible parking lots (all empty) with our caravan of cars we finally stopped. All our friends and us were wearing hiking clothes and hiking shoes. I found it quite funny that the „hike“ consisted first of stairs and then at the top we continued on a paved road. It was really beautiful weather. And it was peaceful as there was nobody except our group going up.
Here is a link to more: Pictures of the hike
When we walked back down the stairs it got really crowded. So many other holiday tourists came. We were really happy that we did start so early and have the place for us.
And as we are climbers we could not help ourselves but we had to start climbing on the man made walls. Even though I still do not know what they meant by „climing“…
After the hike we went to the nearby natural hot spring spa and just enjoyed the hot water pools and showers for a few hours. It is especially enjoyable when you know that at home you do not have any hot water…
The rest of the trip consisted of huge Chinese meals and the exquisite Chinese MaoTai rice wine.
Today is the 14th day after Lunar New Year which is a full moon night. This is the end of the Chinese New Year festivities. Today Chinese people eat little glutinous rice balls in a sweet soup. And they also light almost as many fire crackers as on Chinese New Year’s Eve. A few years back fireworks and fire crackers were forbidden in Beijing. Since they allowed it again it seems like people are going crazy. Every day (since I came back) there were fire crackers in the evening. But today it started at about 3 pm and now it is almost midnight and there are still many and they are still really loud. Chinese prefer to have loud fire crackers to scare away the demons. Sure here and there somebody does actually light up the sky with some fire works.
But then those fireworks seem to generate more smoke than light.
I did not write anything last weekend, the weather was just great and we went climbing in our park on our artificial wall again. This time there was no wind and it was really nice in the sunshine. But most of our climbing friends still think it is too cold and prefer to go to an indoor stuffy, smoky and expensive bouldering place.
Since a few months our wall now has the big red logo of a sponsor. They sponsored the prizes for the climbing competiton we had at mid autumn festival. But I think the wall looked nicer without it…
The year of the Rat has just begun. I got the stiches in my heel taken out. It can only get better.
Yesterday we celebrated our Chinese New Year’s Eve with our now 38 friends (2 came later)Â from Beijing with a Chinese banquette dinner with mainly Thai style food and pizza. The Chinese had imported some Chinese high percentage alcohol (Maotai). I tried to argue that as I had been taking antibiotics I unfortunately cannot drink alcohol. But it did not work, especially because Julien told the Chinese that I took my last tablet 5 hours before. So I did have to drink, but just a bit. Not as much as our Chinese friends.
We did the countdown for midnight according to the Beijing time so that we all could go to bed earlier (Thailand is 1 hour behind China). Getting up early for climbing before it gets too hot and being outdoors all day does make us tired in the evenings.
Happy New Year to all of you!