Then we decided to get a bit adventurous. My friends had a festival of birthdays (since when are there so many birthdays in June? ... that makes then September conceptions in case you couldn't work it out) so they decided to go away for a weekend to celebrate. What better thing to do to celebrate your birthday than go out to the hills, haul a 10kg pack up a mountain, get covered in sweat and dirt, sleep on a rock, wake up at 5am and repeat the whole thing again backwards? Yes! I say best birthday idea ever. So that's what we did.
I'm going to give some detail for those who are wishing to do a similar trip. We hired a driver with a small truck, only just big enough to accommodate all of us and our bags. We left Beijing in the middle of the day, stopping at Sanfo to hire some gear. Both the driver and the equipment hire were quite cheap—a few hundred kuai per person all up—and you can basically hire everything except boots. Unfortunately the gear is not particularly well designed for hiking (it's heavy and not weather-proof) but it's fine for a night.
Back to the exciting stuff. We went to 箭扣 (Jiankou, near the town of 西栅子村—Xizhazi), which is one of the most rugged sections of the Great Wall near Beijing. It took us two hours in our tiny van to get there—by which time all of our extremities had gone to sleep, which is really lucky because it was incredibly hot. That is, it was hot until it started raining. Pouring, actually. It was like we arrived in the mountains, and the sky broke in half. Thunder and lightning and huge gusts of wind. When we arrived at the little guesthouse (info here) at the bottom of the mountain the locals were actually laughing at us. Great Wall fail.
We ate. We waited. We lamented our forgotten raincoats safely in our dry wardrobes at home. We considered the likelihood of being struck by lightning on a tower. We drank beer to calm the sense of frustration.
Somebody must have prayed as well, because as suddenly as it had started, the inclement weather miraculously dissipated. What the? As it turns out, the rain was a godsend because it cooled the air to a bearable hiking temperature and, the best part, it cleared the smog completely! So my adventures at the Great Wall had now come full circle. And it was glorious:
And the best thing is ... I got a room with a view:
It's at this point, you inch yourself to make sure you're not dreaming and think: what an amazing adventure I'm on!
I'm going to give some detail for those who are wishing to do a similar trip. We hired a driver with a small truck, only just big enough to accommodate all of us and our bags. We left Beijing in the middle of the day, stopping at Sanfo to hire some gear. Both the driver and the equipment hire were quite cheap—a few hundred kuai per person all up—and you can basically hire everything except boots. Unfortunately the gear is not particularly well designed for hiking (it's heavy and not weather-proof) but it's fine for a night.
Back to the exciting stuff. We went to 箭扣 (Jiankou, near the town of 西栅子村—Xizhazi), which is one of the most rugged sections of the Great Wall near Beijing. It took us two hours in our tiny van to get there—by which time all of our extremities had gone to sleep, which is really lucky because it was incredibly hot. That is, it was hot until it started raining. Pouring, actually. It was like we arrived in the mountains, and the sky broke in half. Thunder and lightning and huge gusts of wind. When we arrived at the little guesthouse (info here) at the bottom of the mountain the locals were actually laughing at us. Great Wall fail.
We ate. We waited. We lamented our forgotten raincoats safely in our dry wardrobes at home. We considered the likelihood of being struck by lightning on a tower. We drank beer to calm the sense of frustration.
Somebody must have prayed as well, because as suddenly as it had started, the inclement weather miraculously dissipated. What the? As it turns out, the rain was a godsend because it cooled the air to a bearable hiking temperature and, the best part, it cleared the smog completely! So my adventures at the Great Wall had now come full circle. And it was glorious:
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