The Great Scramble

Yesterday, Laura and I, along with her friends Chris and John, decided to go to the Great Wall. Since I’m coming back to China in September, and Laura and John live here (Chris is visiting), we thought it would be fun to go to one of the unrestored sections of the wall instead of the traditional touristy areas. Great idea, poor execution.

Poor execution example 1: No GPS in China. What should have been an hour and a half drive turned into almost three hours. Since it wasn’t a touristy area, our cab driver got incredibly lost. The Chinese, at least out in the villages, are also terrible at giving directions. We got no less than six different opinions. I don’t speak Chinese, but I think the conversations went something like this. Approach fork in the road and ask local if we take a right or a left. Response “well, the fishing village is Northwest, and you came from Beijing, so maybe turn around and backtrack.” Around 1:00, we finally made it.

Poor execution example 2: How much higher is it? The Great wall is built on a mountain. If you don’t go to a tourist region where you can drive half way up, cable car up, or walk up steps, you have to scale the mountain. Ok, not the worst thing, we all like hiking and were up for an adventure. We did, however, somehow manage to pick the highest peak that we could see for miles. Jeans, cashmere sweaters, and long down jackets / pea coats: not ideal clothing for what became a two-hour strenuous scramble up the mountain. A decent portion was open rock face and walking along narrow ledges; we were on all fours for about half the way up.

Poor execution example 3: Racing the setting sun. We had little time to celebrate our victory of making it to the Wall on top of the mountain. It was 3:00 by that point and we knew it would be pitch black by 5:00. Going down the way we came up didn’t seem to be an option – it was borderline too dangerous in daylight and we couldn’t risk getting stuck on the mountain at night. After weighing our options, we decided to try to walk along the wall several miles towards one of the tourist areas a few miles away… despite the fact that our ride home was waiting for us at the bottom of the mountain. Covering a couple miles in two hours doesn’t sound that bad, but the unrestored section of the wall was REALLY unrestored. We might as well have been back on the ledge on the mountain. Parts were steep enough that we actually had to “slide” down on our butts. We didn’t think we’d make it by dark, but we were hoping to minimally make it to a section of the wall that was safer to walk on figuring that if it came down to it, we could use light from our phones or absolutely worst case scenario wait the night out in one of the towers.

Luckily – we came to the restored section of the wall sooner than anticipated. (It should also probably be noted that to getting to this section involved jumping over a gate with a big sign on the other side that said “Danger: No Admittance”) In any case, the sun was just setting at 4:30 and we were able to haul ass to cover the last mile to a cable car just as darkness set in. The last part of the adventure was bribing one of the few locals still around to drive us the 10K back to where our cab was miraculously still waiting.

Finally some good decisions: Despite being completely exhausted and smelling of mountain and dirty cab, we decided to celebrate our victory (aka survival) by going to the nicest duck restaurant in Beijing. We followed dinner up with a full body massage and sleep-walked home at 12:30am.