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)

Where does the smog come from?

Ok so this is my street on a beautiful blue-sky day: 

And this is the same street on a slightly worse than average day (but certainly not the worst!): 

The blue-sky days only happen once a fortnight, or once a week if I'm lucky!

I’ve been talking about the smog ever since I arrived here in Beijing, and I keep asking the question: where does it come from? Why do no other countries have such a dramatic problem?

I’ve finally found the answer in this article:

In January, a vice mayor of Beijing shared some figures for sources of Beijing air pollution. Of course, it is hard to independently verify these figures. But according to the local official, at least 22 per cent is from car emissions, 16.7 per cent from coal combustion, 16 per cent from building and road construction dust and particles, 6.3 per cent from industrial emissions, 4.5 from the burning of corn and wheat stocks and other activities in nearby rural areas. And 24.5 per cent of Beijing smog comes from surrounding urban and industrial areas, including Tianjin and Hebei. That’s what the vice mayor says, anyway.

…

Many Western cities have gone through a very polluted stage. London used to suffer very badly from “London fog,” which was really smog. At first, people didn’t know the major source of air pollution was burning coal; then they realized it was a big problem, and London gradually phased out coal-fired power plants within city limits. That greatly reduced the discharge of sulphur dioxide, starting in the 1950s. Los Angeles faced a different type of air pollution — it was less about coal and more about car emissions. The way that L.A. addressed air-quality problems was by increasing mileage standards and fuel quality [in California], and also by improving the emissions-control devices installed on cars.

Air pollution in China is such a big challenge because it’s a combination of these two sources — coal combustion and cars. The newer coal-fired power plants do have stricter emissions standards, but meanwhile the number of cars is still rising quickly in Beijing and other cities. Beijing’s current plan does call for phasing out coal combustion within the Fifth Ring Road [an expressway encircling the city] and also retiring older, more polluting cars soon. But the surrounding areas outside of Beijing still have considerably less stringent standards on coal and car emissions, so this is a challenge.