Day 295 - You can see it from space

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The planned lie in was ditched for a visit to the Great Wall of China with us choosing to walk from Jinshanling to Simatai against the guest house staff’s advice of visiting a piece of the wall closer by. Where we wanted to go would be full of tourists and was too far away - ARRGH. As it turned out they were wrong but at least we now know which trip pays them the higher commissions.

In a country so keen on its dragons we expected a bit of a rough time today, what with being English and it being St. George's Day, but these fears proved unfounded.

Anyway ignoring their advice we made our way with about 25 other like minded tourists to Jinshanling so that we can walk along the wall for about 10km to Simatai. We had a fantastic day, the wall looking as we have always imagined it and it also actually looks like it does in the photos that everyone knows stretching over hills into the distance making its way over the mountain ridges keeping the Mongols out of China. It all turned out a bit futile (or an astute bit of tourism industry forward planning) as Ghengis Khan just bribed his way over the wall. Apart from the locals that followed us all the way like shadows we were the only group of people walking along the crumbling wall. At one point we looked in both directions and could not see anyone else around. It was magical.

Near Jinshanling the wall had a limited amount of restoration, basically so that you can walk on it although it still looks more or less the way they found it, ie old and crumbling. As we moved into the area known as Simatai it was more like a Disneyland set, looking too new and restored and by the sound of it what we would have seen if we had visited the place nearer to Beijing. We were really pleased to have stuck to our guns and made this trip, it was amazing just seeing the wall go off into the distance, another thing we would not have seen if we had visited the other two sites as those were only a few kilometres long.


Whilst on the topic it's worth mentioning that our research concludes that you certainly cannot see the Great Wall from the moon, and it's just a myth that it's the only manmade object visible from space. Apparently you can just make it out from the edge of space under near perfect conditions, but in that situation you can see loads of manmade objects like runways and large buildings so it's far from unique. Even the Chinese have recently admitted this by removing it from their schoolbooks after their most celebrated astronaut said it wasn't true.

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