My first go at ... the Great Wall!

There's really only one thing to say about the Great Wall. It's spectacular! It's everything you expect it to be when you look at those pictures that fancy photographers post on their websites to make themselves seem well-travelled.

I've been now twice since I've been living in Beijing, and both have been very worthwhile. The first time I went with a tour group—Beijing Hikers—to 龙泉峪 (Longquanyu), which is an unrestored part of the wall (=crumbling rocks, overgrown shrubs and a whole lot of natural beauty). It was an incredibly smoggy day; in fact, according to the US Embassy live twitter feed on air quality, the air was 'hazardous'—i.e. the worst possible rating. If you're wondering how normal that is, I've seen 'hazardous' 2-3 times in the seven weeks I've been here. When it gets to that point, you can hardly see 500m in front of you and your nasal passages start to fill with gunk, so that you have to blow your nose once an hour just to breathe. That's the kind of pollution that gives you asthma even when you've never had it at home.

Anyway, back to the Great Wall. So when I first went there I couldn't see much for the haze. What I could see was pretty much like everything you see in pictures - long sweeping curves of wall that look like they've been painted by a Chinese water painter's brush tip, against a landscape that's dense with bright green forestation ... and tourists everywhere! The one thing that was actually surprising (that I hadn't noticed just from seeing pics) was the steepness of the mountains. The wall goes straight along the ridge line, which is incredibly jagged. It's like the teeth of a coarse saw if you look at it from the side. To give you an idea, the Chinese character for mountain is based on a pictograph and it looks like this: 山.

So walking along the Great Wall essentially involves going straight up a hill to the top, and then straight back down again. None of this faffing about zigzagging from left to right to make it easier on the old hammies. Nope, let's just go straight up the thing. It looks lovely from photographs but, to be honest, is not a particularly practical way to take on a mountain. What's even more amazing is ... they built a wall on it! Who's idea was that? Really, these mountains are virtually impassable anyway, it seems a little ridiculous when you get to the top to see they've built a wall that essentially goes vertically up the side of the mountain to keep out the 'invaders'.

But the climb is totally worth it. Check it out:

By the way, a small piece of trivia: the Great Wall is not visible from space. Google it.


(stay tuned for part two of the Great Wall series)