Hiking History

When people think of China, the Great Wall is among the first images that come to mind right behind the scrawny kid with half-face glasses winning a computer game competition and before a bedazzling contest, but maybe that's just me. Unfortunately, with a billion people all raving up for China's Coming Out Party during the Beijing Olympics, the last place a tour-group-hating traveler wants to be is the Great Wall of China.

The solution was to drive to a portion of the Wall in a different province and hike ten kilometers on the Wall back into the district of Beijing. Two hours plus and one road checkpoint later, we reached a section of the Wall without the lines of mega buses and the perky tour guide flags that I have grown to dispise.

A couple in Inner Mongolia hiked the same portion of the Great Wall and forewarned us that if we didn't outrun the vendors at the very beginning, they would stay with us the entire time. Jogging a kilometer is not really a challenging feat except when being performed on the crumbling stairs of the Great Wall that had degraded to such an extreme in some spots that they were nothing more than bits of pebbles in a steep decline. Our up and down climbing would be appropriate in a chase sequence of a Scooby Doo episode.

The older vendors gave up fairly quickly, but some of the younger men were still in pursuit, taunting us to try and out run them. What they weren't expecting was someone who understood their language well enough to turn around and yell at them to stop. The ringleader, who I selected to confront, had a few choice words for me, which I only recently learned but never used. Still, they backed off.

My friends and I kept a brisk pace and kept a guard tower between us and where the more determined vendor-stalkers maintained a distance. They finally stopped chasing us around the seventh guard tower, which could be due to the fact that climbing a sixty-foot ladder would be less steep and less treacherous than the hazardous incline of the that part of the Wall.

The guard tower at the top was more intact than many of the others we had seen so far in that it still had a roof. Light filtered in from the windows splashing spots of illumination across the miniature maze of the tower's stone columns. Looking out, the Great Wall zigzagged to the horizon, haphazardly thrown on the ridges and into the valleys of the mountain peaks like a child's forgotten toy train track, still mostly intact.

The rest of the hike was serenely breathtaking. We did give the bored Wall guards something to do when we accidently climbed to a ancient guard tower off limits. We discovered belatedly that the Wall on the other side had collapsed.

Contrary to my preconceived misgivings, trekking the Great Wall proved to be one of the highlights of our trip even with the predatory vendors and pulverized steps. For the sake of all the future China explorers hoping for a shred of authenticity, I hope the Chinese government never gets around to "restoring" this section of the Great Wall, though ziplining down to the bottom of it was really fun!