The Wall!

Well, I'm back from the wall. Whew! Was a tough day, but worth it. Like I said last night/this morning, I was up at 5:30 after 3hrs sleep to get to a hostel in Nanlogou Hutong for 6:45am to get our lift to the wall. Was a cheap enough day - 3hr bus trip, 5(ish) hrs on the wall, 3hrs back, all for 155 kuai, with the Great Wall Adventure Club! We got dropped off in a place called Jinshanling around 10am and then had a 9km hike along the wall to get to Simitai where the bus was to pick us up around 2:30ish.

Of course, the ad for the trip said "9km", but that was 9km as the crow flies, and as you can see by the pic we were going nowhere near as straight as that! Also, they never mentioned the 30min hike from where the bus drops you off to the actual wall, and the 20min hike at the other end in Simatai either! Simatai is a big tourist spot, one of the main places you visit the wall from so there's some facilities there. Jinshanling however is anything but! The only reason we stopped there was because it was a place where the road/dirt track went relatively near the wall.

We thought we had tour guides as well to bring us along the wall - as if you really need directions on a wall, all you need to know is which side is Mongolia and which is China, and we had that figured out in 30 secs. True enough, the "guides" only stayed with us until we stopped for lunch, and as soon as we sat down they produced postcards, books and t-shirts from their bags and started pestering us to buy them! Me and another guy got a t-shirt each in the end for 20 kuai, and as soon as it was clear we weren't buying anything else, our "guides" pissed off! According to the blurb on the website, " It is safer as the service in this section of Great Wall includes that one tour guide is responsible for one tourist, for his/her safety actually. When needed, the tour guides will go hand in hand to protect the tourists.". Only if they're buying stuff apparently! We didn't mind tho, as it was such a quiet part of the wall that they were the only ones really trying to sell us stuff - it's apparently pretty bad at the more "popular" spots like Badaling and Mutianyu.

As for the wall itself, well, wow. The first bit was easy enough, and the last bit (coming in to Simatai), but the middle 2-3km is pretty tough on the auld legs. You're talking maybe 70-degree slopes on one or two hills, and as it's a part of the wall that has never been repaired it can be tricky going as well (in one part the wall has collapsed and if you stay on the wall it's only 2 bricks wide for a dozen meters or so). And the steps! At home you think you're doing good if you take the stairs to say the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Sagrada Familia in Barca - I was doing the equivalent I reckon about once every 45min! You defintely start feeling it in your legs by the end.

Ah well, now I can say "been there, done that, bought the t-shirt!" :-)