AN EPIC TALE

Here we are again intrepid readers. I will relate the epic tale of the Great Wall of China and our not-so-intrepid hikers. To make this abundantly clear, I would like to point out that I did NOT THINK. I didn’t think at all. They said there would be a walk, but I was picturing the kind of walk that you usually do at tourist places. You wander around, surrounded by other tourists, and don’t really work up a sweat.

The “free water bottle” that came with purchase of our tickets should have been a sign.

Anyway, we drove up to our starting point with a group of American students (younger than Erika and me and mostly female) and two Brits in fluorescent short shorts. I was so excited to get out of the car that all thoughts of nausea were stolen away by the early morning breeze. It was the perfect weather for a hike: cool with a little bit of a bite, enough to make you feel good, but not so much that you should bundle up.

Our driver led us to a map; he pointed out where we were and where we needed to meet him in four hours. That was the red map I put on the previous blog post. That’s also when I realized our hike might be more that a little wandering on a wall. It was a serious hike. With hills. And parts of the wall were crumbly, so we’d have to jump over sections.


We had four hours to get from Jinshanling to Simatai. This didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. However, it was about 11 kilometers of hiking, and this wasn’t an easy eleven. My family likes hiking, and I’m not in terrible shape. But there was no section of wall that was level and easy. We hiked up and down mountain after mountain. If I’d known the difficulty level, maybe I would have prepared a little more. Like getting a good night’s sleep, or drinking more water. There really wasn’t any way to remove the whole vomiting thing, so we’ll ignore it.


Anyway, when we started, Erika and I were kind of behind the group. Not to be pretentious assholes, but neither of us really wanted to be associated with a rather loud group of Americans. We caught up to them talking to six or seven Chinese people. Erika and I kind of ignored them and continued. Then one of the ladies of the group started walking along with us and told us about how she was a poor Mongolian farmer and she had no job. I thought that was an interesting contradiction. Then she pointed out that one side of the wall was Inner Mongolia, and the other was China. I thought that could be interesting if true, but didn't do more than grunt. She then told me about how difficult her life as a Mongolian farmer was, and I found that to be an interesting bit of fiction. We were polite, but not encouraging. After several minutes of attempting conversation, she finally gave up and tried to sell us some shirts.




The first two hours of our hike consisted of that exact group of people trying to sell merchandise. Erika and I managed to avoid most of the hassle because we didn’t encourage them from the start. However, the other Americans had a harder time. When we were going up a particularly steep mountain, the “Mongolian Farmers” would grab their hands and “help” them to the top. Then they’d ask for payment. (I included a picture of the "help") I really don’t blame them for trying to make a living, but then again, they didn’t bother Erika and me (we just weren’t friendly enough). I think the other Americans may have learned the whole “If they’re too friendly, they’re selling something” lesson.



Along the way, there were other people at various towers selling water, pop, juice, t-shirts, postcards, and (my personal favorite) beer. Alas, the years of soccer tournaments taught me that beer would only dehydrate me further (that came out wrong), so I didn’t partake. Also, I didn’t want to spend five won on water.

Eleven kilometers. That’s around seven miles. It doesn’t seem like much, but try doing it in non-hiking clothes, going up and down mountains, dehydrated, and with no food in your system. The first three hours were fine. We took in the stunning beauty of the wall. And I do mean stunning. I took over a hundred pictures of the Great Wall, and Erika might have taken twice that. We really did get an incredible grasp for why the Great Wall is actually great. The views were spectacular, the wall itself was a marvel of epic proportions, and the thought of all the effort and materials that went into it was staggering. All I can say is that the Xiongnu must have scared the pants off the Chinese.

After three hours, however, the wall was just a freaking wall, and the hike seemed like it had lasted for an eternity. I started hallucinating about how I had fallen and broken my head early in the hike. That would make the unending hike Purgatory, and the people selling their overpriced drinks were demons. Or angels. Even after reading Dante, I find Purgatory confusing. It’s a good thing I’m not Catholic. Our fellow hikers were getting incredibly negative, and I realized I was definitely developing a sunburn. Three and a half hours into the hike, we realized that we were lost. None of us knew where we were supposed to stop. Four hours into it, we were even more lost. It seemed like we were supposed to have reached the end, but we didn’t see anything.


After about four and a quarter hours, we reached an area filled with tourists. We were psyched. It had to be the place. The only question was: where was the bloody turn off? You’d think it’d be easy to see.
It was not.


(Insane Cable Suspension Bridge. Picture included mostly for the civil engineers I'm related to.)
Also, we were faced with one of the steepest mountains in our hike. I’m including a picture because the sight alone was enough to make two of the hikers cry (not Erika and me, I swear). It's sort of hard to tell, but look for the towers. It's not that big a deal unless you've been hiking for FOUR HOURS.

We walked down into the valley, and I thought for sure the second tower was the place we turned off. Well, after crossing a rather insane bridge and climbing up to the second tower, literally pausing every five steps, there was this tiny path away from the wall.
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I said, “I think this is it.” The girl we were near said, “Let’s just go around the tower and see if the rest of the group is on the other side. We don’t want to turn off and have to retrace our steps.”

This was a sensible idea, so we did that. Sure enough, the rest of the group was trudging up the mountain. If one of my organs were predisposed to remove itself from my body, my heart would have sunk out the soles of my feet. Apparently, my organs are not predisposed to diffusion (lucky for the rest of me) so I had to keep going (lucky is a state of mind. I was kind of preferring death by organ diffusion at this point). We stepped up five stairs. We paused. We went up two more. We paused. We leaned on the rock wall, literally trying to drag ourselves up with our arms because we couldn’t lift our legs.

I’d like to take a moment from the melodrama and inject some sanity.

I can’t. We really did try to drag ourselves up with our arms. Not only that, but all these other tourists were streaming up and down the stairs past us. All I wanted to shout was “Don’t judge us! We’ve hiked eleven kilometers already!” But I didn’t know how to say that in Chinese (all I could say was hello and thank you. I didn’t think shouting those two words over and over would get any message across other than that I was wrong in the head). Instead, we hiked up that freaking mountain for something like forty minutes. The worst of it was that we didn’t have any idea how much further we needed to go. We were actually lost on the Great Wall of China. It’s a wall, for Christ’s sake. How do you get lost ON a wall? Finally, we found some people who spoke English and asked them where the turnoff for Simatai was.

I’m sure you may have guessed it, but it was that second tower. Nobody was certain, and none of us were willing to climb back up that freaking mountain a second time, so there was a lot of hemming and hawing. However, we went back down and walked off the tower at that tiny turnoff. Ten minutes later, we were in front of the restaurant we were supposed to be at almost an hour before. The only people there ahead of us were the two British guys in their florescent shorts. They’d been waiting for forty-five minutes, and they couldn’t eat until we’d arrived. The two of them mentioned this, and everyone apologized profusely. Then I said, “You guys were sitting in the shade having a beer. I feel more sorry for us.”

Luckily, everyone laughed, or I would’ve looked like a jerk. But really, we walked up an extra mountain and were late because of that. I don’t really care if they had to wait for us.

So that was the Great Wall of China. It began with extreme lack of sleep, food poisoning, and beautiful views. It ended with exhaustion, mild hallucinations and mediocre Chinese food. I suppose that’s as fitting an end to an epic event as any. To those of us who did the hike it was a once in a lifetime experience (largely because we’d never do it again). However, we probably appreciate the awesomeness of the Great Wall of China better than your average tourists. So we’ve got that going for us.