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Our mode of transport for the day
Buick is surprisingly popular over here. I have see lots of them. This morning Jane, Rhonda, Rochelle and I rented a car and a driver for the day to go to a section of the Great Wall at Simatai. This is a location about 110 km northeast of Beijing in Miyun County. It's about a 2 - 2.5 hour ride to get there with traffic. We met our driver at the hotel just after 8:00 am. He was a very nice man with a relatively new Buick van. After some introductions we were on our way.
The day was overcast in Beijing but not nearly as hot or humid as the day before. Once we got to the outskirts of the city traffic really freed up. The scenery changed quite a bit as well. Everything was green and lush as we made our way into the country side. In contrast to the beauty of the countryside, the little towns we drove through seemed dirty dilapidated. It was clear that people in the countryside were living a subsistence lifestyle in abundant poverty. I have not scene anything like this since I was in Albania 9 years ago.
We passed orchards of pears, cherries and peaches. Each pear tree had its pears individually
wrapped in brown cloth as some sort of protective measure. We also saw a lot of corn, but not huge fields of it. People planted corn wherever they could in their towns or yards I assumed just to have a few extra ears for either feed or their own consumption. The soil in the area seemed claylike from what I could see from the van.
Mountains began to appear as well. This just added to the rural beauty of the area we were travelling through.
We saw billboards for several wineries as well. I’m not sure about the quality of Chinese wines, but I’m going to try and get my hands on a bottle while I’m here to give it a try.
After about two hours we made it to Simatai. As we pulled into the parking lot it was clear that we had come to a less touristy part of the wall. There were only 3 tour buses there and most of the tourists were Chinese nationals. We only saw a handful of Westerners besides ourselves all day.
My guidebook describes Simatai in the following way: “The wall at Simatai has only been partially restored,
View from the bottom
Yup, we had to hike up ti that ridgeline to get to the wall! affording a more genuine impression of the original wall. The steep and hazardous parts of the wall are also a lot riskier to navigate. Most visitors clamber along the eastern section of the wall at Simatai, which leads to much steeper sections of the wall and later, impassable ruins. The views are superb here.”
We got our tickets, entered the site and started walking. There were two ways up; cable car or a long walk. We chose the long walk. At first it was slow and winding up the mountainside. Eventually we reached the wall and could begin our walk on it as it went up and down the ridgeline. Soon after we encountered a group of locals who as best we could make out, wanted to be our guides on the wall. We didn’t think this was necessary at first but they kept following us and walking with us. We soon realized why. The wall is so steep and treacherous in parts that it does help to have someone walk with you and help you along in parts. This was even more helpful today is it was raining at times and the smooth old stones were slick and
treacherous.
For more general info about the wall, click here:
http://www.travelchinaguide.com/china_great_wall/
The views from the wall were amazing in all directions. We would hike to a tower on the wall as a stopping point and catch our breath. There were 8 towers to hike to before you could reach a point to hike down to the cable car station to get down. At times it was easy to hike and at other times it was slow going because of the steep terrain and smooth wet rocks. At different points the wall is not very wide and there little to no edges or ramparts on either side of it. One bad slip and you would go over the edge for a steep, long fall. I had an additional odd sensation in some of these areas, a strange form of vertigo. The wind was whipping the treetops below on either side of the wall and it had the appearance of rushing water on each side of the wall just below my feet. It was slightly unsettling to say the least.
When we were ready to take the cable car down, our guides wanted each of us to buy a
book from them as “payment” for their services. It was just an inexpensive coffee table picture book of the Great Wall and seemed like a more than reasonable fee ($20) for all the help they had given us for the several hours we were on the wall. We probably got ripped off, but didn’t really care at this point. As we took the cable car down the rain began to pour and the wind picked up too. We were happy and exhausted when we got to the bottom. Our driver was waiting for us and we hopped in the van to head back to the hotel. I think everyone fell asleep at some point as we were so tired. The trip back was uneventful and took about 2.5 hours.
The wall is an amazing feat of engineering. It was peaceful and unsettling at the same time. The wall is really several walls across China as there was never enough money to connect the whole thing. It was designed to keep out the Mongol hordes from invading China. As I stood on the wall and thought about defending it tactically (you can take the man out of the military but
you can’t take the military out of the man) I could only imagine how brutal the warfare would have been on it. It’s interesting to note that the wall was largely ineffective at accomplishing its intended purpose. Its funny how walls throughout history have been ultimately ineffective at accomplishing their intended purpose. (Warning: political commentary.) If only our current leaders recognized this, maybe we wouldn’t be wasting money building a wall along our border with Mexico.
Overall it was an unbelievable day, a truly once in a lifetime experience.
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