The Great Wall

By Jace K

July 12^th, 2016

The Great Wall

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The Great Wall of China. Depending on how you count it, it’s nearly 9000 kilometres long running from east to west, roughly following the southern border of Inner Mongolia.

Our journey started in Beijing, rather too late in the day, and without proper organisation. That’s just how these things go sometimes.

The part of the wall we wanted to visit started at a town called Gubeikou, which is a bit out of Beijing and required a couple of bus rides to get there. We made sure we got an early start and so left around lunchtime, catching a bus to Miyun, a town we hadn’t heard of. On my street map it looked like a small village but afterwards we found out the Miyun urban area has around 125,000 inhabitants. This sort of underestimation happened to us all the time in China.

From Miyun we were to catch another bus to Gubeikou. Waiting at the bus stop, people stopped in private cars they called taxis and told us our bus wasn’t coming. Thinking of ourselves as experienced travellers, we took no notice and kept waiting. Time passed slowly, along with many busses, none of which were ours. Some youths with a smartphone helpfully looked up the bus timetable and confirmed that our bus was still coming. Shortly after, a man in one of the “taxis” stopped and talked to them, and then they smiled and instead confirmed that it wasn’t coming after all. The taxi driver looked over at us hopefully; we ignored him. After a while he got bored and left. The youths’ bus arrived and they left, too. We stood around in the cold.

Eventually it became clear that the taxi drivers were right after all and we gave up on the bus started looking for a taxi instead. One stopped and we negotiated a (somewhat high) fare and were on our way. By now it was dark.

Gubeikou found us safely and our driver helped us arrange a guesthouse in the deserted town. We were the only guests, disturbing the family owners with our arrival. They busied themselves organising our room and finding us something to eat. They spoke to us only in Mandarin with the help of a few printed pages of common words they used as a phrasebook. The conversations took a little while as they tried to teach us Mandarin as we went along, but they were extremely patient and enthusiastically praised us each time we managed to correctly repeat a new word.

After dinner we went straight to bed. Outside it was cold and there were finally stars instead of people.

The next morning we woke up early to start the walk. The family was already up, smiling and doing their t’ai chi to tinny, high pitched music. They brought us a breakfast of congee, steamed bread and something that, only after tasting it, revealed itself to be some kind of congealed blood. We finished the bread and smooshed the blood around to make it look like we had eaten some.

The start of the trail was on the other side of the village. To be honest, we hadn’t really taken the idea of this walk very seriously. People had talked about “climbing the wall” but even that phrase didn’t really seem to make sense. What was there to climb? Maybe a few stairs up the side but then you just run along the top, don’t you?

Well, not quite.

The wall was built on the top of a ridge. Of course it was; no one would build a defensive wall at the bottom of a valley. And the ridge here isn’t exactly level. So when the ridge climbs and drops, as it does constantly, so does the wall. Furthermore, the section of wall that we walked was mostly old and crumbling. The result was that instead of “just running along the top”, the day consisted of climbing up and down a never ending, severely damaged staircase. And actually, that was fine. As we stumbled along we thought of all the poor people who had to carry the rocks up to build the wall. And the even less fortunate people tasked with the job of attacking it.

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As the day warmed up, the wall slowly changed from ancient stone to not quite so ancient but still fairly ancient crumbling brick. The countryside was silent and the trail nearly deserted, quite unexpected for China. We chatted briefly with a family from Thailand, busying themselves with selfies. Later, the path turned off and headed away from the wall, and we walked through leafless birch forests and along dusty fields, passing frozen wells and trampling over dead stalks of corn.

After a short break we turned back up the hillside and onto the wall again. This section was new, restored in the 80’s. More tourists appeared, as well as vendors selling instant noodles, T-shirts and beer. One such man was set up inside one of the towers. He informed us that he was “a farmer; very poor”. His T-shirts were cheap, but we didn’t really want one. Still, we decided to give him a little money anyway. The problem was, we didn’t have any small change so we had to explain somehow that we wanted to buy a T-shirt (so that he would give us change), but then that we didn’t want the shirt after all, but he could still keep the money. Eventually what was happening dawned on him and a huge smile spread across his face. At the next tower were several more “farmers” selling the same shirts. Oh well.

By now we were completely exhausted after seven hours of walking up and down broken stairs. At a particularly steep point some other tourists told us it wasn’t far to go. This is always a lie.

Eventually we reached the final tower revealing the path down and back. A friendly woman asked us in broken English what we were doing and we told her that we were catching the bus. She kept saying things in Mandarin as if we understood. We nodded and smiled and thanked her and went on. Annoyingly, she continued to walk with us, the whole time speaking to us in Mandarin mixed with little bits of English, trying to sell us pencils. We ignored her and carried on walking. At some point she stopped and then insisted we leave the main path and follow her along a little dirt trail down the side of the mountain. This seemed deeply suspicious. We hesitated, looking at each other and then back to the woman. After a while we realised that what she was probably saying was more or less, “you stupid tourists, if you want to get that last bus then you better follow me. You’ll never make it if you take the main path. It goes all the way down the other side of that mountain there. Seriously. Stop wasting time.”

Well then.

We delayed a little longer anyway, and then shrugged and followed her down the goat track. For forty minutes we walked down the mountain, through bare forests lit in golden light, all the time wondering if that really was what she said, or if we were going to end up in some little village away from civilization with no chance of getting back to Beijing. Not having much choice, we kept on until we finally hit the main road, delighted. We gave her rather too small a tip for the help she gave, refused the pencils again and pushed on down the road for another two kilometres to where the bus would stop. Arriving with at least 15 minutes to spare we rested, pretty pleased with ourselves. Cheekily, the bus arrived and then left 10 minutes early. On the bus we finished the rest of our snacks and fell into a sort of daze for the long ride back to Beijing.