Like the Great Barrier Reef, the Great Wall of China is
worthy of the title “Great”, not necessarily for its architectural grandeur,
although there are subtle design features which are elegant; nor its’ structural
beauty, it’s really just a stack of bricks set in an grand landscape, but it
earns the designation for the sheer size and magnitude of its’ construction. The
scale is absolutely astounding. Although started in the Qin dynasty (~210 BC) the
heyday of its construction was during the Ming dynasty (14th-17th
centuries). The Great Wall is ~5000 miles long, ~15-20 feet wide,~25 feet tall, these are rough figures, but you
give you some idea of the immensity of the structure and why it is considered
one of the 7 Wonders of the World. Over
three days, I had the opportunity to climb five different sections of the wall;
Badaling, Juyongguan Pass, Huang Hua Chang, Mutienyu, and Jinshanling; and in
that time I hiked maybe 20 miles, so while I may have seen more of the wall
than the average visitor, in reality I saw very little of the wall.
Climbing the wall is not as easy as you might think. Except
for the real touristy sections, you usually have to walk up quite a number of
stairs or climb part of the mountain just to get on top of the wall, or if you
want to take the easy way out, at some touristy sections they have cables cars
which will bring you up the wall with no effort on your part. Climbing the wall
is not like hiking up a mountain where you walk up in one direction to the top
and then down in the other direction to the bottom. When climbing on the wall
the general trends are upward and downward, but since the wall follows the
contours of the mountain, you walk up and down in both directions; picture a
stock market chart. In many places the wall is steep, sometimes very steep, and
there is very little level ground on top of the wall; you are always either
leaning forward walking up or leaning backwards walking down, and as if that
wasn’t difficult enough, in one section they added a twist. At Mutienyu, the top
of the wall is also slanted to one side in order to allow rainwater to run into
a gutter running along the edge. Climbing the wall is not necessarily
dangerous, but you certainly have to watch your footing. In the touristy sections,
the stones of been replaced, paths are smooth and they’ve even added a
handrail; everything is fairly solid, but even there, the rise and run on
stairs is not always of the same height or depth creating a challenge and when
wet they can be slippery. In some of the wilder places I hiked, stones were
broken or missing on the path and stairs, guard towers and the wall itself were
crumbling, and large sections of the ramparts were completely gone. You could easily trip, fall, or walk right
off the edge of the wall, but these were the most interesting and beautiful
places to climb. Best of all, there were relatively few people in these areas
and many times I would be blissfully climbing completely alone.
I gained my first glimpse of the wall, high upon mountaintop,
as we were stuck in traffic on the way to our way to the first stop Badaling.
Traffic is horrible in Beijing, the surrounding area and pretty much everywhere
I went in China, including the rivers; but what can you expect in a city of 20
million and a country of 1.3 billion. Badaling is the closest section of the
wall to Beijing and the most visited by foreigners and Chinese alike. According
to my guide Sean , the reason for its popularity is that Chairman Mao once walked
on this piece of the wall and said anyone who climbs the wall here is a hero,
so now all the Chinese people come to this section of the wall, to them Badaling
= The Great Wall. It’s funny, as you enter the gate to climb up onto the wall
you can go either to the right or to the left. Virtually everyone goes to the
right since this is the way Mao walked, it is also less steep than going to the
left, but there were what seemed like thousands of people going to the right
and maybe a hundred going the other way. This part of the wall has been
restored to accommodate the hoards of visitors and they’ve even added handrails
to make the climb easier. Given all
that, Badaling was my least favorite section.
My next stop was Juyongguan Pass. This part of the wall was
out of the ordinary because it wasn’t just a straight line of wall; it
encircled the mountain pass so you could walk completely around its 2.5 mile
circumference. Known as the Juyong Stronghold it guarded the Juyong Pass. There
is a gate at the north and south end of the valley that travelers would have to
pass through and the wall rises from the gates and runs across the mountaintops
flanking each side of the pass with the town inside the ring of wall. It’s
really like a big castle, but instead of lying on flat ground, the walls are on
the slopes and mountaintop. The first part was steep (always start with the
hardest while you still have energy) and I thought tough, until I saw a little
old Chinese lady with a cane slowly climbing the stairs one step at a time and
she was almost to the top. I had been
climbing for 40 minutes and she may have taken much longer, but I still was
amazed; it’s a hard climb. I later met a 62 year old Chinese man on the way
down. One interesting architectural feature was the rampart; like a castle, the
crenellations at the top of the wall for defense were only on the outer facing
part of the wall, the inner part being low and rounded. Although Juyongguan
Pass has been repaired and they’ve added handrails, it still is an impressive
part of the wall to visit.
Huang Hua Chang – “Yellow Flower Village” was probably the
best section of wall I visited. It is a wild, raw, unrestored part of wall. This
part is not open to the public; I know this because that’s what Sean told me
and you pass a sign saying so after you pay an old farmer 2 yuan, about 30
cents, to cross her land to climb up onto the wall. Climbing here I had the
wall almost all to myself although I did meet two girls from Switzerland at the
“end”. It was not really the end,
because the wall did continue on for a long way, as far as you could see, but
at this point the wall took a steep downward angle and the steps were badly
deteriorated making any descent dangerous. You could also see a little further
along that there was a break in the continuum of the wall and vegetation was
growing along the top of the wall. Besides that, my time was up and I needed to
head back. How it worked was that Sean would get me to the wall and then tell
me what time to be back, usually about three hours. I would then climb as far
as I could leaving enough time to get back to where I started, assuming that if
I did not return at the appointed time Sean would come look for me; glad I
didn’t have to test that assumption. We stayed at a local “hotel”. I’ll never
understand the logic of an all in one toilet/shower. That’s where the bathroom
has a drain in the floor and the shower is next to the bowl without any
separation or curtain; it’s like a shower with a toilet bowl. Everything gets
wet when you shower. I can understand it on a boat where you are space limited,
but on land it doesn’t make sense to me. The whole room smelled damp and moldy.
They had a large concrete basin outside maybe six feet long by three feet wide
by three feet deep, filled with about a foot of semi-clean water and an aerator
bubbling in it. There was also a large, bottom dwelling fish in it. Turns out
that was dinner; at least I knew it was fresh.
From there we went to another touristy spot, Mutienyu. There they had two gondolas that would take
you up to opposite ends of the wall. They also had a “toboggan” run that you
could ride down. There is no ice, the sled runs on plastic blades in a steel
half-pipe. Having seen them on TV and always wanting to try one, I rode it
down; lots of fun. For a touristy section, Mutienyu is not too bad. It has a
nice steep finish with a set of nearly vertical steps that end on top of a
guard tower for a great view. The day I was there people were applauding if you
made it to the top of the tower. There is the obligatory gauntlet of souvenir
shops and vendors you have to pass to and from the parking lot, but you see
these at every section of the wall and anywhere tourists congregate in China.
The final section of wall I climbed was Jinshanling. This
was the farthest from Beijing and outside the municipality of Beijing; and
because of the distance it did not have very many visitors. This is a very
beautiful, very long section of wall. Here you can walk 10.5 unobstructed miles
and it was the only section where I ran out of time before I ran out of wall.
There was still a lot of wall flowing up along the mountain ridge and I had the
energy to go on, but unfortunately my time had run out and I had to return as
the sun was starting to set. Jinshanling was a splendid way to end my adventure
climbing the Great Wall of China and was an experience I will never forget.
Next up Beijing to Hong Kong with a side trek to Tibet.
norb-posted by emelia
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