How the hell do you clean an air conditioning unit?

My air con has a wall mounted unit inside and I can stand on a chair and poke at that easily enough, but the functional part of the air conditioner is outside, bolted to the wall. I presume that's where the condenser coils and whatnot are. If they need to be cleaned, well, I'm seven stories up and there's a fixed set of window bars between me and the outside world. I can't get at that part. I presume this is the circumstance most Chinese apartment dwellers find themselves, so what do they do?

The only part that should need to be cleaned are the filters/screens on the inside part.

And as it happens, I was able to slide those filters out and brush them down in a sink-full of warm soapy water, and that did the trick. The water turned black (yuck), the filters came out shiny (woohoo), and the room with the aircon on no longer smells like motor oil (wtf?!). Damn fiddly getting the filters back in though. A lot of bad words were said.

Every "how to clean your air conditioner" resource on the internet seems to suggest doing - at least something - with the big motor part. I couldn't make out what. But, yeah, not needed this time around. Woo!

When I was younger, I worked with my father who owned his own AC and electrical company.  For outside units, we would use a water hose to clean the condenser/coils.  Fairly simple.  Also, we would use a water hose to remove ants that would sometimes build a mound in the outside unit.

It does get rained on whenever the heaven's open. Not the same, I guess.

If the wind blows the right way during a typhoon, that would clean the coils.