The Great Wall

Saturday morning my SYA classmates and I visited the biggest, longest, and probably most famous landmark in China, the Great Wall. Now because the Great Wall is so long (the Chinese name for it is 长城 – literally translating into “long wall”), there are a lot of places you can visit. We drove for about two hours to a fairly rural spot where there were not as many tourists. The teachers basically let us run free on the wall. They arranged for the busses to pick us up in a small town further down the wall that we hiked to. So we basically hiked the wall for four hours. Now many people, including myself, envisioned the great wall as a flat, level wall that you can just stroll on for miles and miles, and while this may be the case in some of the restored tourist areas, the area we covered was quite a challenge. The Wall traverses mountains and valleys, and accordingly many parts of the wall are quite steep to climb and descend. Because it was built a couple thousand years ago, the steps are ridiculously steep and uneven.

Half an hour into the hike entire group was drenched in sweat and were huffing and puffing up and down the wall. Guard towers provided a cool shaded place to rest from the heat, but inside hordes of merchants waited to sell thirsty tourists cold water, cokes, beers, tee shirts, and fans. We were told to beware of some of the friendlier merchants who would follow you for miles on the wall and then demand that you buy something because “you owed it to them”. Luckily we were able to convince most of the clingy ones that we didn’t have any money and that we weren’t interested in buying memorabilia. The hike itself was spectacular. The area surrounding the wall was practically uninhabited and the landscaped stretched for miles (or kilometers as the case may be). I packed an umbrella because it had rained in Beijing the previous day, but luckily I never had to use it as the weather was perfect the entire day. The Great Wall is incredibly photogenic, so I got some great shots. There isn’t too much to say about the wall, overall the entire day went really well, so I will leave you with some of the better shots. As always a full album will be at the end.