I like to walk everywhere I go in China. On my walks I see a lot of interesting and different things. One of these things was the playgrounds. Playgrounds have some of the regular things that we have in Canada, including stuff to climb on and stuff to swing on. Their playgrounds have something extra: exercise equipment. The equipment is disguised as a toy with bright colours and round edges. I’ve seen chin-up bars, elliptical things, stuff to work abs, some weights, a chest press type thing, and some other… things. I really need to go to the gym more and learn the names of these devices. The point is that when kids go there they play on the equipment. They never see it as something separate from fun and are more likely to do it always. Also, when parents or grandparents go to the park with young ones they have something to do other than sit on a bench, even though there are also benches. Overweight people are just a rare sight in general and overweight kids are even rarer. I hear that obesity is going up in kids here but compared to Canada they don’t have a problem at all. It’s not hard to see why. Also, there are bikes everywhere, lots of people walk and the food just seems a lot less processed in most places.
Old people are monsters here. They often seem to remain in very good health despite the fact that they all smoke like chimneys. We were shown a way down from the Great Wall by a man who was nearly 60 and he was smoking while climbing a cliff and set a pace that our young bodies (tired from hiking and carrying bags, mind you) could barely keep up to. Seniors often are seen in some parks doing Tai-Chi or maybe dancing or other styles of martial arts. I had to laugh a little when I saw someone with a poster trying to show the plight of senior citizens. It was about how they don’t have a way to retire and have to work even in old age. It showed a picture of an old woman with a huge bundle of sticks on her back. I could see the point that the guy was trying to make, about how old people shouldn’t have to do backbreaking labour and all that, but I couldn’t help but laugh to myself that this tiny old woman was about 70 probably and as strong as an ox! She didn’t look like she needed any help whatsoever.
Being here makes me think how dependant we are on our cars and all of our other little devices that make our lives easier. We drive around the block! Here, I use the subway but it’s still a few blocks away. If I had a bike (and the courage to drive it on the roads here because it’s insane here) I’d probably ride it everywhere. My mind is hectic today so I think I’m jumping all over here, but my point is that fitness is just ingrained in the culture a lot more than it is with our culture. People are just healthier.. except for the chain-smoking and pollution.
I guess I’ll take a moment to update on my training. Starting next week I train in the meteor hammer on Tuesday and Thursday for two hours each! My schedule will be this: Sanda at 7:40-10:30am M-F, meteor hammer from 2-4pm T,Th, Chinese language 2-5pm M,W,F and weight lifting with some friends whenever, probably a few times a week and maybe some jogging tossed in for effect. By the way, my legs are sore today. And, it turns out, the Wushu that I’m going to learn can be anything. The teacher told me I could just learn whatever I wanted! So I’m probably going to do some kind of stick or another weapon or long fist or something. I’ll decide that before November. Any ideas?
Oh right, by the way, the Sanda teacher was late on Friday and the Wushu teacher decided to help us all stretch. Have you ever had someone physically tear at your ligaments? That’s what he did. we stretched our farthest and he pushed us until we wanted to cry. It turns out my reaction to pain is laughter. I don’t know why. I was laughing when he made my joints hurt. It does work though. I'm limber like Gumby
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Monday, October 6, 2008
China Journal: The Great Wall Epic 2008-10-03 4:42PM
Wow I’ve been putting this off for a bit. Sorry, but I have been busy and lazy at the same time and haven’t been keeping up with my journal. Not much has happened really in this time. Not much except for climbing the great wall! No no, hold your applause until the end. Wait for the story to start at least! Oh, you’re too kind.
My great wall trek starts in my dorm at six thirty am the day that we start. Me and my friends are not at all prepared because we procrastinated and went out the previous night to enjoy spirits and social interaction. We skip off to the market which is luckily open early and buy sandwiches and processed snacks. I made sure to buy at least a couple of packs of peanuts as peanuts are a magical snack supplying the snacker with boundless energy. I also bought some tubes of meat. The best food we bought was from a guy with a stand right outside our school. He made little breakfast sandwiches with lettuce, chicken and egg in a bun with tasty, brown sauce. This man was a master of the chopstick arts. They moved as if by themselves and assembled a sandwich in zero time. I was flabbergasted. My friends were less than impressed. Whatever. We each bought four and packed them along with the rest of our snacks. I had little space for all of my food so I had to tie a bag of bananas to the back of my bag. To reiterate, the plan was to hike, sleep on the wall, then hike some more. We needed sleeping bags. We didn’t have any. We didn’t want to spend the money. We rolled up the covers from our beds and tied them with belts and spare rope to our bags. My one friend had a Samsonite satchel. We set off for the subway station with our program leader Hunter.
To get to the wall we had to ride the subway across Beijing and then get on a bus to travel to the very outskirts and then we found a guy in a van who did his own tourism stuff with the wall and he drove us the rest of the way. Luckily, we stopped at a supermarket and Tyler bought a backpack to use instead of his laptop satchel. Later in the story you will realize that this was the wisest decision he made.
This paragraph marks the start of the actual trip! We reach a town where there is a path up to
the wall. We decided to forgo the nice, happy gondola and the clean and tidy remade great wall and instead wanted to go to the broken down, falling apart old Great wall. Hunter asks a couple of locals and the point us to a path. We pass a tiny kennel on the way and I pet some disgustingly cute puppies. I have pictures of that. Go look. They’re cute. On the left after the kennel is a little path. We assumed that this path was the right one and walked in. After a few minutes we pass an elderly woman and I begin to think that this path may turn out to be too easy. I quickly forget this when the path gets steeper and I decide that the old lady is just a monster. (By the way, sorry to all of the grammar Nazis out there that are hating how I sometimes switch from past to present tense.) The path eventually goes from steep to steeper and we start to climb a little. It started out with one little rock face that had little risk to it and we soon found ourselves climbing near vertical cliffs with death waiting below. I might sound as if I’m laying it on a little thick but I’m really not. Though the hand and footholds were numerous, if we were to have fallen it would have been a short drop and a long roll. At one point we heard what was unmistakably the hum of a hive of bees. My friend, Tyler, chose that moment to mention that he was deathly allergic to bees. My only advice was to climb slowly and steadily and make no erratic movements. We got to the top without incident and sat on some rocks eating some roasted nuts. Tasty.
This top that I just mentioned was not quite the “top” top. The great wall was still a little way ahead. The whole first part of the climb, Rolf, our Norwegian Sherpa, took the lead by a good distance. The last leg Tyler was the first one in line. I stayed in the back as I often took pictures and then caught up. I heard Tyler from up ahead yell that there was a wall in the way and that the path was impassable. I let out a cheer and ran up to join him to see that the wall he was talking about was a wall of rock, not the Great Wall. I hated him for a short time. Luckily, around that rock wall was the Great Wall itself. I ran up and let out a cry of triumph! We made it to the top using the most dangerous route and a minimal amount of preparedness. Congrats to us.
We met a Canadian couple who took another, easier route. I guess we took the path on the left when we should’ve taken the path on the right. Oh well. I liked our route. We didn’t die so it’s all good. Next time I’ll bring rope though.
The first site of the wall was a guard tower. An old man had made a camp there and was selling beer. I had one, of course. It was very nice after the long walk and it served as my celebratory treat. the view from the tower was amazing. I can’t describe it well enough to do it justice, so use your imagination because I’m going to try. I could see the entire mountain range that surrounded us. Not mountains like home, but more like foothills. Nothing goes over the tree-line so everything is green right to the horizon. Bah, this isn’t working. They should’ve sent a poet. Up there we could see our path clearly. The wall wound out in both directions from us. Off to the right we could see in the distance the gondola up to the reconstructed part. The other way was more overgrown and rough looking, even from a distance. The clean, easy way wasn’t for us so we set off to the left. Far off we could see the tower called “Eagles Flies Upward Tower” that Hunter, our Chinese friend/program director, pointed out.
We were told by a couple of Chinese people that we met that there is a metal ladder with a drop-off in the direction we were heading. We found it. What happened with it is there was a stone walkway around a cliff and the walkway was so decrepit that it had fallen away at one point directly below the steel ladder. I went down first. I like climbing and am very sure of my feet below me and I was nervous going down it. The ladder was easy. The bottom of the ladder, however, hangs in the air with a thirty foot drop to a rock slide. The trick is to hold onto the metal railing that is set up after the ladder that used to border the stone walkway and walk along the rock wall. I had a large backpack so moving was tricky for this part. One slip and I would have fallen to the rock slide below and rolled for awhile. Of course, I set my foot down on the solid rock and walked away from the edge and pulled out my camera on video mode. Tyler, with his short legs, took his time but got down without incident. Rolf, who is a little more reckless, had a little incident. He started off normally but as soon as he got to the wall, he stepped on and let go of the rail, turned around and spied his landing and went to jump. He made what could have been a fatal mistake. He hesitated. He second guessed himself and stumbled, went to grab the railing and missed. He landed on his side and would have rolled under the railing but luckily his large bag jammed him for a moment, long enough for Tyler to grab him. He came close to a nasty fall. I have it on video. In it I’m swearing loudly. Sorry. Hunter, who’s been here before and is smaller, simply climbed down the rail. That guy, he could’ve told us. But I guess if he did I wouldn’t have the story.
The trail gets rougher from there. They call it climbing the Great Wall for a reason. There isn’t much walking involved. The stairs for that first day were mostly crumbled and rocky. Tricky because there were more than a few loose bricks. The crawling pace we had going down those stairs was definitely necessary. I would’ve upped the pace for sure but I’m not a foolhardy guy when I can see my handicap, ie my bag’s size in this case. This was a bit of a pain for the whole trip. Not because it was hard to climb as such, but more because my bag would catch on branches and also make it hard to turn around in narrow corridors.
Towards the end of the first day, we arrived at a guard tower. The sky was getting dim and we thought we should stop before it got dark. Sadly, the tower was a little below our lofty standards for living. The walls were quite crumbly and we were going to be forced to sleep in rubble. We moved on. In the failing light we carefully climbed down a crumbling stairway to another tower not too far from the last. This was one of the more dangerous times because we had to be very sure of our footholds and in the failing light it gets harder to find them. Luckily the stairway was only approximately 25ft high and the climb was short. We walked into our new home and it was glorious. The ground was mainly free of debris with a couple of the windows already partially blocked with bricks to keep out the wind. We quickly made our living quarters and went to find wood. We found two twigs and some green stuff. After a half hour of failed attempts at a fire we gave up and sat in the dark talking and eating cold food.
Sleep was harder to find that night than wood. We were sleeping in the blankets off of our beds and didn’t bring ground mats. It was drafty and chilly and the souls of the dead Chinese workers buried below us were very talkative. My legs were bundled up in my tiny sleeping nook, crossed like I was sitting when I fell backwards into sleep. What little sleep I did have was filled with restless dreaming, most of which is remembered only with feelings and small fragments and one scent that stood out even to my dreaming self. One part that made me glad for the terrible sleep was seeing the stars. Out in the countryside the stars are bright and clear and they twinkle more than at home. I woke up and looked out my tiny window to see Orion perfectly framed. I laid there looking at the stars for a good hour that night. I wouldn’t have traded that sight for a restful night. It was an odd sleep. When the sun rose I was glad to get out of my little nest, stretch my legs and await the coming warmth of the sun.
We were lucky when we woke up to see something that I thought was pretty amazing. The clouds were everywhere around and below us so that the sky was clear but the ground below the mountains was cloudy. The clouds were flowing from the Beijing side onto the other side through a short spot on the wall and it looked like a white river steadily streaming down the mountain.
We cleaned up and set our sights on the Eagle’s Tower. Our goal was a long way off but we figured we could make it in a few hours. I had on my jeans and a long shirt because the sun was being a jerk and hiding behind the peak of the tower we slept in. We climbed down a steep staircase, the jagged rock sharp on our cold hands. The area below us was relatively flat and we all took the time to change to warm weather clothes as soon as the sun hit us. That was nice sun too. It just seemed like the most pure sunlight shining down after being cold all night, tossing and turning. I felt charged by it like I had solar panels hooked into my system.
Walking along the wall I marvelled at the forest within the wall itself. It really showed me how old the wall actually is. The wall is in great condition on the outside because it is made of huge bricks cut from the mountain itself and the smaller bricks are on top of those to make the actual walking surface. The trees seem to have taken root within these little bricks and stretched their roots all through the wall itself. Walking along the narrow trails the tree canopy almost blocks the sun for long stretches. There are broken archways and stacks of old bricks and stone stairways every so often, all hidden inside the Great Wall’s garden. The guard towers are the same in this respect as some of their roofs have collapsed in the middle and overgrown leaving them looking like small, contained gardens with fifty foot cliffs all around.
The sheer size of the great wall blew my mind! Trying to grasp the concept of how many people and how long it took to build it is almost too much to try and comprehend. The foundation bricks are gigantic, about one meter long by half a meter tall, and carved from stone. I cannot really understand how they could move them around and place them when I have a hard time just climbing the cliffs themselves. I’m, guessing at some kind of system with ramps and pulleys or something. The most mind boggling part is the tall stairways, namely Sky Stairs. These stairways climb the steepest parts of the mountains. The stairs themselves are half a meter tall and only about 10-20 cm wide! We theorized that ancient Chinese are eight feet tall and thin as rails because that is the only type of person who could use stairs like this in a normal fashion. These Sky Stairs were very tall and became narrower the higher I climbed. At the narrowest point I wouldn’t have been able to turn sideways with my huge bag. I loved it. As soon as we got to the top and celebrated our conquering of these monster stairs we looked ahead on the path to see another set almost as tall and a lot more crumbly. How nice. The second one was definitely a harrowing climb. The stairs lay mostly in a pile at the bottom so we had to rely on the shattered rock wall to serve as our stairs. The rock in China is great in that it always seems to have excellent handholds and footholds. Also, because these paths are frequented by other hikers, the loose rocks haven mostly fallen down with those ill-fated travelers, the wall is relatively clear of trick holds.
The view from the top of the eagle’s tower was better than the first tower. I think this is because we had worked so much harder to get to it. It lived up to its name. The cliff off the one side was a straight drop down for what may have been hundreds of feet. I’m not good at estimating distances, especially from memory, but believe me when I say that if I’d have jumped, I could have screamed for a breath and a half at least.
That was it. We had climbed the great wall! We were at our destination and now it was time to walk to the town. It was two in the afternoon and we figured about an hour hike. This calculation was made before we remembered what the great wall was made for. It’s not called the Great Fence. It turns out that the walls leave a good twenty to thirty foot drop even if there’s no cliff. We had no rope so we had to find a hole in the wall. That’s not hard. Just by walking the length of the wall we would eventually find a way down as we’d seen at least half a dozen on our way up here. We climb up to the next tower and run into our first dilemma. The staircase down the other side is completely crumbled leaving a cliff that would need rope. We’ve been in this situation before earlier that day and just find a path around it. In about ten minutes we’re down the stairs after our little detour. That’s when we see the next cliff that used to be stairs. We are all tired and don’t want to tackle a full-on cliff as we’ve been hiking for about six hours on little
sleep. We decide to hike around again.
The hike takes us down a path that steadily gets steeper. The dirt turns to leaves and the leaves turn to mud. My shoes have no grip and if I step on the many rocks I risk sending them down to meet my friends. Whenever we have been on a path that doesn’t seem often used, like this one seemed, we regain our faith in it by seeing the scattered water bottles and other wrappers along the path. These sure signs kept us going up the first path to the mountain and they kept us going down this sure path off the mountain. We came to a cliff. We went back to the wall. Hunter made a call to someone who knew the wall. We tried another path. We hit a cliff, taller than the other one. We scrambled up the mud and rocks to the wall again. After another phone call we tried again. Third tries are always the luckiest. We reached a cliff again. Luckily, it was small and easily climbable so we went down. The next cliff, about twenty feet after it, was very tall. Very, very tall. At this point we deduced that the wrappers and bottles were not cast aside along this trail but along another and washed down our slippery path by the rain. Elementary, my dear Watson. We climbed back to the great wall. That’s thrice that we climbed down and up. I loved it though. The whole time I was laughing and saying it was great. My friends hated that. I’ll also not that Tyler is Hypoglycaemic and hadn’t had any fruit in a while. Rolf, nice guy that he is, noisily munched an apple down while Tyler was suffering a sugar shortage in his body. Suffice to say, Tyler did not appreciate my happy-go-lucky attitude.
How did we get down? I’ll tell you. Hunter called again and a local of the nearby village, a fifty year old man, hiked up from his house in forty minutes. We saw him on the other side of the broken wall and waved. We figured he would take some secret, invisible path up and started to wait. In less than a minute he was there beside us. We were flabbergasted. After he paused for another smoke (how he got here that fast while smoking, I’ll never get) he showed us a small climbable path near the collapsed portion. In less than an hour we were down the mountain and getting into the van of a local tourism business. It was now about five. We spent at least a couple hours climbing the nearby mountainside.
The drive back was the most nerve-wracking, scary part of the whole trip. The guy whizzed through the mountain roads and at one point passed a bus on a blind turn. He refused to give way and forced the oncoming vehicle and bicycle onto the shoulder. I cheered at that move but tightened my grip on the holy *expletive deleted* handle. By the way, seatbelts are not often worn in China and the seat I had did not have one.
There. That’s my book. Sorry it was a little long winded.
My great wall trek starts in my dorm at six thirty am the day that we start. Me and my friends are not at all prepared because we procrastinated and went out the previous night to enjoy spirits and social interaction. We skip off to the market which is luckily open early and buy sandwiches and processed snacks. I made sure to buy at least a couple of packs of peanuts as peanuts are a magical snack supplying the snacker with boundless energy. I also bought some tubes of meat. The best food we bought was from a guy with a stand right outside our school. He made little breakfast sandwiches with lettuce, chicken and egg in a bun with tasty, brown sauce. This man was a master of the chopstick arts. They moved as if by themselves and assembled a sandwich in zero time. I was flabbergasted. My friends were less than impressed. Whatever. We each bought four and packed them along with the rest of our snacks. I had little space for all of my food so I had to tie a bag of bananas to the back of my bag. To reiterate, the plan was to hike, sleep on the wall, then hike some more. We needed sleeping bags. We didn’t have any. We didn’t want to spend the money. We rolled up the covers from our beds and tied them with belts and spare rope to our bags. My one friend had a Samsonite satchel. We set off for the subway station with our program leader Hunter.
To get to the wall we had to ride the subway across Beijing and then get on a bus to travel to the very outskirts and then we found a guy in a van who did his own tourism stuff with the wall and he drove us the rest of the way. Luckily, we stopped at a supermarket and Tyler bought a backpack to use instead of his laptop satchel. Later in the story you will realize that this was the wisest decision he made.
This paragraph marks the start of the actual trip! We reach a town where there is a path up to
the wall. We decided to forgo the nice, happy gondola and the clean and tidy remade great wall and instead wanted to go to the broken down, falling apart old Great wall. Hunter asks a couple of locals and the point us to a path. We pass a tiny kennel on the way and I pet some disgustingly cute puppies. I have pictures of that. Go look. They’re cute. On the left after the kennel is a little path. We assumed that this path was the right one and walked in. After a few minutes we pass an elderly woman and I begin to think that this path may turn out to be too easy. I quickly forget this when the path gets steeper and I decide that the old lady is just a monster. (By the way, sorry to all of the grammar Nazis out there that are hating how I sometimes switch from past to present tense.) The path eventually goes from steep to steeper and we start to climb a little. It started out with one little rock face that had little risk to it and we soon found ourselves climbing near vertical cliffs with death waiting below. I might sound as if I’m laying it on a little thick but I’m really not. Though the hand and footholds were numerous, if we were to have fallen it would have been a short drop and a long roll. At one point we heard what was unmistakably the hum of a hive of bees. My friend, Tyler, chose that moment to mention that he was deathly allergic to bees. My only advice was to climb slowly and steadily and make no erratic movements. We got to the top without incident and sat on some rocks eating some roasted nuts. Tasty.
This top that I just mentioned was not quite the “top” top. The great wall was still a little way ahead. The whole first part of the climb, Rolf, our Norwegian Sherpa, took the lead by a good distance. The last leg Tyler was the first one in line. I stayed in the back as I often took pictures and then caught up. I heard Tyler from up ahead yell that there was a wall in the way and that the path was impassable. I let out a cheer and ran up to join him to see that the wall he was talking about was a wall of rock, not the Great Wall. I hated him for a short time. Luckily, around that rock wall was the Great Wall itself. I ran up and let out a cry of triumph! We made it to the top using the most dangerous route and a minimal amount of preparedness. Congrats to us.
We met a Canadian couple who took another, easier route. I guess we took the path on the left when we should’ve taken the path on the right. Oh well. I liked our route. We didn’t die so it’s all good. Next time I’ll bring rope though.
The first site of the wall was a guard tower. An old man had made a camp there and was selling beer. I had one, of course. It was very nice after the long walk and it served as my celebratory treat. the view from the tower was amazing. I can’t describe it well enough to do it justice, so use your imagination because I’m going to try. I could see the entire mountain range that surrounded us. Not mountains like home, but more like foothills. Nothing goes over the tree-line so everything is green right to the horizon. Bah, this isn’t working. They should’ve sent a poet. Up there we could see our path clearly. The wall wound out in both directions from us. Off to the right we could see in the distance the gondola up to the reconstructed part. The other way was more overgrown and rough looking, even from a distance. The clean, easy way wasn’t for us so we set off to the left. Far off we could see the tower called “Eagles Flies Upward Tower” that Hunter, our Chinese friend/program director, pointed out.
We were told by a couple of Chinese people that we met that there is a metal ladder with a drop-off in the direction we were heading. We found it. What happened with it is there was a stone walkway around a cliff and the walkway was so decrepit that it had fallen away at one point directly below the steel ladder. I went down first. I like climbing and am very sure of my feet below me and I was nervous going down it. The ladder was easy. The bottom of the ladder, however, hangs in the air with a thirty foot drop to a rock slide. The trick is to hold onto the metal railing that is set up after the ladder that used to border the stone walkway and walk along the rock wall. I had a large backpack so moving was tricky for this part. One slip and I would have fallen to the rock slide below and rolled for awhile. Of course, I set my foot down on the solid rock and walked away from the edge and pulled out my camera on video mode. Tyler, with his short legs, took his time but got down without incident. Rolf, who is a little more reckless, had a little incident. He started off normally but as soon as he got to the wall, he stepped on and let go of the rail, turned around and spied his landing and went to jump. He made what could have been a fatal mistake. He hesitated. He second guessed himself and stumbled, went to grab the railing and missed. He landed on his side and would have rolled under the railing but luckily his large bag jammed him for a moment, long enough for Tyler to grab him. He came close to a nasty fall. I have it on video. In it I’m swearing loudly. Sorry. Hunter, who’s been here before and is smaller, simply climbed down the rail. That guy, he could’ve told us. But I guess if he did I wouldn’t have the story.
The trail gets rougher from there. They call it climbing the Great Wall for a reason. There isn’t much walking involved. The stairs for that first day were mostly crumbled and rocky. Tricky because there were more than a few loose bricks. The crawling pace we had going down those stairs was definitely necessary. I would’ve upped the pace for sure but I’m not a foolhardy guy when I can see my handicap, ie my bag’s size in this case. This was a bit of a pain for the whole trip. Not because it was hard to climb as such, but more because my bag would catch on branches and also make it hard to turn around in narrow corridors.
Towards the end of the first day, we arrived at a guard tower. The sky was getting dim and we thought we should stop before it got dark. Sadly, the tower was a little below our lofty standards for living. The walls were quite crumbly and we were going to be forced to sleep in rubble. We moved on. In the failing light we carefully climbed down a crumbling stairway to another tower not too far from the last. This was one of the more dangerous times because we had to be very sure of our footholds and in the failing light it gets harder to find them. Luckily the stairway was only approximately 25ft high and the climb was short. We walked into our new home and it was glorious. The ground was mainly free of debris with a couple of the windows already partially blocked with bricks to keep out the wind. We quickly made our living quarters and went to find wood. We found two twigs and some green stuff. After a half hour of failed attempts at a fire we gave up and sat in the dark talking and eating cold food.
Sleep was harder to find that night than wood. We were sleeping in the blankets off of our beds and didn’t bring ground mats. It was drafty and chilly and the souls of the dead Chinese workers buried below us were very talkative. My legs were bundled up in my tiny sleeping nook, crossed like I was sitting when I fell backwards into sleep. What little sleep I did have was filled with restless dreaming, most of which is remembered only with feelings and small fragments and one scent that stood out even to my dreaming self. One part that made me glad for the terrible sleep was seeing the stars. Out in the countryside the stars are bright and clear and they twinkle more than at home. I woke up and looked out my tiny window to see Orion perfectly framed. I laid there looking at the stars for a good hour that night. I wouldn’t have traded that sight for a restful night. It was an odd sleep. When the sun rose I was glad to get out of my little nest, stretch my legs and await the coming warmth of the sun.
We were lucky when we woke up to see something that I thought was pretty amazing. The clouds were everywhere around and below us so that the sky was clear but the ground below the mountains was cloudy. The clouds were flowing from the Beijing side onto the other side through a short spot on the wall and it looked like a white river steadily streaming down the mountain.
We cleaned up and set our sights on the Eagle’s Tower. Our goal was a long way off but we figured we could make it in a few hours. I had on my jeans and a long shirt because the sun was being a jerk and hiding behind the peak of the tower we slept in. We climbed down a steep staircase, the jagged rock sharp on our cold hands. The area below us was relatively flat and we all took the time to change to warm weather clothes as soon as the sun hit us. That was nice sun too. It just seemed like the most pure sunlight shining down after being cold all night, tossing and turning. I felt charged by it like I had solar panels hooked into my system.
Walking along the wall I marvelled at the forest within the wall itself. It really showed me how old the wall actually is. The wall is in great condition on the outside because it is made of huge bricks cut from the mountain itself and the smaller bricks are on top of those to make the actual walking surface. The trees seem to have taken root within these little bricks and stretched their roots all through the wall itself. Walking along the narrow trails the tree canopy almost blocks the sun for long stretches. There are broken archways and stacks of old bricks and stone stairways every so often, all hidden inside the Great Wall’s garden. The guard towers are the same in this respect as some of their roofs have collapsed in the middle and overgrown leaving them looking like small, contained gardens with fifty foot cliffs all around.
The sheer size of the great wall blew my mind! Trying to grasp the concept of how many people and how long it took to build it is almost too much to try and comprehend. The foundation bricks are gigantic, about one meter long by half a meter tall, and carved from stone. I cannot really understand how they could move them around and place them when I have a hard time just climbing the cliffs themselves. I’m, guessing at some kind of system with ramps and pulleys or something. The most mind boggling part is the tall stairways, namely Sky Stairs. These stairways climb the steepest parts of the mountains. The stairs themselves are half a meter tall and only about 10-20 cm wide! We theorized that ancient Chinese are eight feet tall and thin as rails because that is the only type of person who could use stairs like this in a normal fashion. These Sky Stairs were very tall and became narrower the higher I climbed. At the narrowest point I wouldn’t have been able to turn sideways with my huge bag. I loved it. As soon as we got to the top and celebrated our conquering of these monster stairs we looked ahead on the path to see another set almost as tall and a lot more crumbly. How nice. The second one was definitely a harrowing climb. The stairs lay mostly in a pile at the bottom so we had to rely on the shattered rock wall to serve as our stairs. The rock in China is great in that it always seems to have excellent handholds and footholds. Also, because these paths are frequented by other hikers, the loose rocks haven mostly fallen down with those ill-fated travelers, the wall is relatively clear of trick holds.
The view from the top of the eagle’s tower was better than the first tower. I think this is because we had worked so much harder to get to it. It lived up to its name. The cliff off the one side was a straight drop down for what may have been hundreds of feet. I’m not good at estimating distances, especially from memory, but believe me when I say that if I’d have jumped, I could have screamed for a breath and a half at least.
That was it. We had climbed the great wall! We were at our destination and now it was time to walk to the town. It was two in the afternoon and we figured about an hour hike. This calculation was made before we remembered what the great wall was made for. It’s not called the Great Fence. It turns out that the walls leave a good twenty to thirty foot drop even if there’s no cliff. We had no rope so we had to find a hole in the wall. That’s not hard. Just by walking the length of the wall we would eventually find a way down as we’d seen at least half a dozen on our way up here. We climb up to the next tower and run into our first dilemma. The staircase down the other side is completely crumbled leaving a cliff that would need rope. We’ve been in this situation before earlier that day and just find a path around it. In about ten minutes we’re down the stairs after our little detour. That’s when we see the next cliff that used to be stairs. We are all tired and don’t want to tackle a full-on cliff as we’ve been hiking for about six hours on little
sleep. We decide to hike around again.
The hike takes us down a path that steadily gets steeper. The dirt turns to leaves and the leaves turn to mud. My shoes have no grip and if I step on the many rocks I risk sending them down to meet my friends. Whenever we have been on a path that doesn’t seem often used, like this one seemed, we regain our faith in it by seeing the scattered water bottles and other wrappers along the path. These sure signs kept us going up the first path to the mountain and they kept us going down this sure path off the mountain. We came to a cliff. We went back to the wall. Hunter made a call to someone who knew the wall. We tried another path. We hit a cliff, taller than the other one. We scrambled up the mud and rocks to the wall again. After another phone call we tried again. Third tries are always the luckiest. We reached a cliff again. Luckily, it was small and easily climbable so we went down. The next cliff, about twenty feet after it, was very tall. Very, very tall. At this point we deduced that the wrappers and bottles were not cast aside along this trail but along another and washed down our slippery path by the rain. Elementary, my dear Watson. We climbed back to the great wall. That’s thrice that we climbed down and up. I loved it though. The whole time I was laughing and saying it was great. My friends hated that. I’ll also not that Tyler is Hypoglycaemic and hadn’t had any fruit in a while. Rolf, nice guy that he is, noisily munched an apple down while Tyler was suffering a sugar shortage in his body. Suffice to say, Tyler did not appreciate my happy-go-lucky attitude.
How did we get down? I’ll tell you. Hunter called again and a local of the nearby village, a fifty year old man, hiked up from his house in forty minutes. We saw him on the other side of the broken wall and waved. We figured he would take some secret, invisible path up and started to wait. In less than a minute he was there beside us. We were flabbergasted. After he paused for another smoke (how he got here that fast while smoking, I’ll never get) he showed us a small climbable path near the collapsed portion. In less than an hour we were down the mountain and getting into the van of a local tourism business. It was now about five. We spent at least a couple hours climbing the nearby mountainside.
The drive back was the most nerve-wracking, scary part of the whole trip. The guy whizzed through the mountain roads and at one point passed a bus on a blind turn. He refused to give way and forced the oncoming vehicle and bicycle onto the shoulder. I cheered at that move but tightened my grip on the holy *expletive deleted* handle. By the way, seatbelts are not often worn in China and the seat I had did not have one.
There. That’s my book. Sorry it was a little long winded.
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