One Year Away

Joseph

See the China 2 album for pictures from the Great Wall.

China sent up their first astronaut almost exactly one year ago.  When Yang Liwei came down he said that contrary to popular belief he was not able to see the Great Wall from orbit.  China announced that in the future all its textbooks would be changed to reflect that.  There goes another random fact I learned in childhood!

Despite not being visible from space the Great Wall is one of those sites that no tourist can miss.  So we decided to do the 4 hour hike on the wall from Jinshanling to Simatai.  We organized through our hotel and the bus picked us up at 7 AM.  Who do we see on board but our two friends from the Gobi expedition, Kai and Erik!  We caught up a bit on what we’d each been doing and then napped most of the way to the wall.

The wall right around Jinshanling has been restored to its former self.  In parts it looks no more than a few years old.  The area between Jinshanling and Simatai is covered in steep hills and the Great Wall rises and plunges over them right at the apex of each hill.  Every few hundred meters there is a large watchtower where Chinese soldiers kept a lookout for Mongolian barbarians.  The watchtowers were also used to communicate across large distances quickly by using signal fires.  The signal fires were made by burning wolf dung (I assume wolf dung collector was the lowest job in the army!).

Penny and I set a slower pace than some of the others.  The climb in some sections is so steep you
need to use both your hands to help you up.  As we left the area around Jinshanling we also left the restored section of the wall.  It abruptly becomes old and crumbling.  Surprisingly though it is still intact enough that we never needed to get off and hike next to it. 

As we walked, middle aged local women would walk next to us and offer to carry our bag or tell us about the wall.  We didn’t want one of these unofficial tour guides to latch on to us so we made sure to not accept any of their offers.  Other unsuspecting tourists end up walking next to a unofficial guide for the whole 4 hours only to be told at the end that they owe money as a guide fee. 

The climb/hike was more challenging than we expected and by the half way point at the 15th watchtower we were quite tired.  Luckily the second half of the climb had more downhills than uphills and we ended up at Simatai ahead of the scheduled bus pickup.

My favorite historical anecdote from the day was that in the end the Great Wall was not effective at keeping out the Mongolian warriors.  The Mongolians were able to bribe the soldiers at certain watchtowers and got through without a fight. 

The hike was tiring and the weather was surprisingly hot but the views of the wall and feeling connected to a historical site that I’ve seen so many time in books and television was definitely worth the effort.