The Wall

Of course, if one is to visit Beijing, one must necessarily climb the Great Wall. So, after arriving on Saturday, we signed up for an early morning trip on Sunday. We got into a van at 7am with two German girls and our driver and drove for over an hour to a less-touristy part of the wall, which was more than fine by E and I, since we aren't particularly enamoured with herds. I thoroughly do not enjoy being part of a tour, so I was happy when our driver just dropped us off with instructions to meet back at the base later in the day.

The Great Wall is an astounding feat of human workmanship, built over hundreds of years (from 600 BC til the 1600s AD) and stretching over 6 400 km (4000 miles). I can't even fathom how much pain and suffering went into building such a thing. Soldiers, prisoners, and common labourers all worked on it, millions of them died from the effort, and then were buried in it. I thought of those people, their entire lives nothing but pain and toil, heat and exhaustion, now forgotten and dead, their bones beneath the bricks I was now treading with running shoes. Hard to fathom.

In any case. I was there, and I saw it, and it was, ahem, great. :) A lot of hype though, I think...too much. At the base we were told we could either walk a grueling 40 minutes up to the wall, or take a cable car. sigh. We walked. It was hardly 20 minutes, and this is what it looked like:
Pretty easy, compared to what we were expecting. Notice the donkey? Helping out the workers I guess.

The wall itself was also surprising. It was narrower than I expected (about 30 feet wide, and no you can't see it from space), and not as high either (only about 25 feet). From the accounts of those gone before, I thought we were in for a punishing ascent up a massive, towering wall, heaving and wheezing all the way, hauling ourselves to the top, hardly able to hold on by the skin of our fingernails. Not so.

Look, here we are on the wall, about 10 minutes after we arrived on it. Does it look like we've just barely escaped death by fatigue?
Yes, it is mostly stairs. But they were only as difficult as stairs are wont to be. We had a blast walking up and down them, but I do admit, the last part of the un-restricted section was a bit demanding and steep. But worth it.

All along the wall were stationed bored, young army boys and policemen. Same as anywhere in Beijing really. During the Ming Dynasty (1300s-1600s), there were over a million men guarding the wall, and it felt like there were a million men still guarding it. They were either sitting and playing cell phone games, looking listlessly out the windows, or walking in slow, disinterested circles. I felt kind of bad for them. I wouldn't want to be posted for hours and hours each day doing nothing on a bunch of bricks while Chinese and foreign tourists clamoured about all day long. Here's one little guy just barely peeking out of the wall...he was leaning out quite far, but then he saw me lift my camera.
And here I am in one of the many watchtowers. This was the last one on the wall before the cut-off for tourists:
Oh yes, we did do one very touristy thing on the way back down. We slid down the mountain! And it was very fun.