French expat in China finds happiness in spite of the rules

Romain Berard, Beijing, China

Why purchase a boat in an arid, land-locked and river-less city?

Check a map of Beijing, you won’t say that a river runs through it…in fact, there are a few downtown, dark and smelly waterways like the Liang Ma river, but the “liquid” within its banks is not something you look forward to paddle on, much less capsize into. There are public parks with lakes but boating is either forbidden or has to be done with rented duck-shaped pedalboats. The sea is not really close-by, and the two main lakes of Huairou and Miyun in the North are totally forbidden to any nautical activity, including swimming.

But once upon a time in August 2007, I went for a very early Sunday trip with a Canadian friend that wanted to show me the place where he intended to set up a bull semen farm. His land was about 200 km away, in the vicinity of the Eastern Qing Tombs. On the way there, we passed along two lakes (Jinhai Lake and lovely Huangxiu Lake) that seemed open to boating and there were two more lakes close to the farm, including the magnificent Shanguan Lake that boasted clean waters (at least you could see some things under the surface), beautiful mountains, the Great Wall, a small marina and little bungalows you could rent for a week-end. I realized I just found a great spot for boating. But just what boat could I get?

Why a sailing kayak?

So I wanted a boat, but something small enough to be shipped from abroad (China is not a huge market for recreational sailors yet), stored at home and carried around with my small car. I then remembered watching, in Crete back in 1989, an elderly couple paddling a wonderful double-kayak made of wood and canvas. This thing was supposed to pack into tiny bags. Would these boats still exist 20 years later? Google probably would have a few things to teach me.

After several days of frantic search on the Internet, I realized that folding kayaks still existed, I understood that a double version was definitely not packed in small bags but rather in big backpacks, and I narrowed my choice to three brands: Longhaul, Nautiraid and Klepper because they were made of wood + canvas which I prefer over aluminum + Nylon . In the end, I chose the Klepper model (a beautiful red Aerius 2) because it was the only one that had a real sailing rig with leeboards (at that time I did not find the Polish Wayland brand which also makes nice wooden kayaks with sailing rigs, for much cheaper than Klepper)

I got in touch with a French (my German being worse than my Chinese) Klepper retailer and the timing was good, only two weeks before a Klepper massive price hike, and the shipment was targeted to arrive just before the October 1st one week vacation (the Chinese National day is not set in July, curiously).

Chinese specifics

As I said, the target was “delivered before October 1st “. Including customs clearance. Well… in the last days of September, the Beijing customs did not know too much what to do with this artifact. They first requested pictures of the assembled kayak which I printed out from the internet. On the pictures, happy kids were seen playing with their parents on artifacts made of canvas stretched on weird wooden frames. Hmm…Strange… Probably dangerous… Potentially even illegal... Maybe this crazy foreigner will really put this folding thing in the water, stuffed with innocent kids…then of course he’ll drown. A whole family killed, for sure, a disaster waiting to happen. Can we take that risk? No. Clearance stayed. And again. And some more….

Finally the local freight forwarder realized that we were getting nowhere and used a friend’s Trading Company to import the shipment. The Klepper was cleared as “advertising material” and delivered to my house on September 30th. Perfect!

Lesson 1: The customs officers are your friends. For your safety, they might block your kayak importation, even if you declared it correctly, even if it was legal to import it, even if you agreed to pay the duties and taxes.

September 30th 2007 is a date to remember as we frantically opened the cartons and built the Klepper for the first time in my Beijing garden.

First Trials

October 1st morning. Where could we go to try it? The lakes I saw in August were a bit far from home for a first trial.

There was probably some kind of lake closer to where I live, only the ones I know are illegal for anything else than watching the water.

Here again, Google had to know something, Google Earth to be specific. After a few minutes searching, I found two lakes within 30 km of where I live. Strange that I never heard of them before. The great thing with Google Earth is you can measure things. The first lake was 2 km long, narrow, between 2 mountains while the second nearby was maybe 1.5 km in diameter, perfectly round. Let’s go there.

First lake. Behind the dam, only a small pond remains, not even 200 meters long. Time to check the second lake. We arrive there. Behind the dam? Nothing. Just a big corn field where water used to be.