Ascending the Great Wall [Sun 11-04 Morning]

[The journey up to the Great Wall and the first half of the hike]

We had quite a journey to the Great Wall. We got up early in the morning, piled into a bus, and rode for around two and a half hours. The point was to get an entry area that would be largely devoid of tourists and it did indeed pay off. There was a bit of a climb to get to even one of the lower points of the wall.

On the way up, we were accompanied by a batch of merchants with a new skill: unrequested assistance in exchange for guilt. Some of our more experienced travelers were able to shake off the help, I wasn’t quite so strong and occasionally didn’t actively refuse assistance and felt obliged to buy a few things. Ultimately, it would have been a better experience had I just said no solidly at the start and stuck by it. Our ’guides’ had some useful information and did make things easier, but I enjoy rock scrambling. Fortunately I did have the willpower to do many bits on my own often having to shake off a helping hand.

The Wall is nothing short of amazing. It’s hard to really grasp the sheer scale of the thing. The great satisfaction of the Great Wall is being able to look forward, sometimes with slight horror, at what you have to climb and then being able to look back at how far you’ve come. It’s a trick a fair number of action RPGs have picked up, to their credit. Anyhow on the first quarter the walk was reasonably smooth, although the stairs were often quite steep and at times no more wider than the width of my feet. The stairs within the towers tended to be particularly bad, although the view from the top was often worth it. In the end, only myself, Katie, and Mick decided to go for the whole walk and rather than heading on to the bus decided to trek all the way to the restaurant where we’d have lunch.

As a side note, in one of these pictures, I helped Mick hold a Union Jack. While I’m an Anglophile, I pledge my allegiance to the U.S. However, the guy’s crazy enough to carry it around with him and he served as a police trainer in Iraq, so I figured as an American the least I could do to show some gratitude is to help him hold his flag.