a weirdo in china, pt. 12: demission

Okay, this is a series of posts about China, I know what you're here to see. It's Great Wall time, people!

Wait, that's a durian pizza, not the Great Wall!

There are actually a bunch of different Great Wall sites to choose from. We visited Mutianyu, the best-restored section, which was still pretty crumbly.

It was actually a gorgeous day by Chinese standards, about 80°F, cloudy, with a cool breeze and zero air pollution this far from the city. All that added up to me being able to push myself much farther than I could have otherwise, which was critical because the Wall is loooooooooooooong.

There are about 20 watchtowers in the area I visited, and each watchtower is roughly 1000 feet from the next. But those 1000 feet are a real doozy. Rather than the flat, shallow curves I'd expected from pictures I've seen, I discovered a Great Wall that was basically a series of cruelly misshaped stairways where it wasn't a 45° ramp.

Traversing it was an ordeal, plain and simple. There are hardly any moments of normal, even walking. You're either climbing stairs that are different heights at each step, forcing you to keep your eyes on the ground and constantly adjusting your gait, or you're hyperextending your knees trying to reach down to the next lower level. Mile after mile, you fight through the exhaustion of it all and continue on, knowing your reward after the next watchtower is more of the same.

That might sound pretty bleak, but don't get the wrong idea. I really enjoyed it! It was a lot of fun managing my energy levels and pushing myself to see how far I could go in the limited time allotted. I didn't make it to the 20th watchtower, but I got to #18, and I felt pretty good about that.

The reason I focused on the physical challenge of it is because, to be frank, I'm not terribly impressed by the fact of the Wall's construction. It's cool, and you aren't likely to see much like it, but the Chinese are quick to admit that it's been worked on for virtually their entire history. I could probably build a pretty cool wall too, if you gave me five thousand years to do it.

Still, it's neat to imagine the guards patrolling this place in its heyday, and wonder what kind of ways they might have found to pass the time. The landscape is fine, but there's nothing really interesting to it besides the Wall itself.

So we wandered around for a couple hours, my friend hunting for millipedes atop the wall, of which there were many. But eventually, things came to an end, and I had to find a way back down the mountain. Now, I had come up to the wall via chair lift.

And chair lift was an option to go back down. But it was far, far from the BEST option.

IT WAS EVEN MORE AMAZING THAN IT LOOKS. I went much faster than the people in that video, and I said 'fiddlesticks' to the men standing on the side of the track telling me to slow down. I said 'fiddlesticks' by slowing down just enough to satisfy them, then immediately zooming away when they were safely out of reach. I could not be stopped. I still can't. It was the best part of the Great Wall, but that's not to say anything bad about the Wall. The toboggan ride was just that incredible. You haven't lived.