Last Sunday we went on the most beautiful, strenuous and dangerous hike ever! Our friend Leah from the States wanted to see the Great Wall and Wen Jie also has never been there herself. So we decided to go see part of the original Great Wall. Most people don't realize that many of the popular tourist Wall sections have been heavily rebuilt and maintained for tourism. Sure they are amazing but there is nothing like seeing the original, crumbling wall.
We packed our bags and rode in two taxis for over an hour into the mountains. The scenery already is amazing and the winding narrow roads are certainly a welcome change from the city streets. We ended up at a very tiny village of sorts near the Jiankou section of the Great Wall. After asking for directions from a tiny store, we drove down a little lane and started on the trail up the mountain. It was obviously well traveled and easy to follow, but got steep as we neared the wall.
The crumbling remains of the walls and watchtowers snaking over the knife-edge mountains was an awesome sight, however our journey over them was sometimes frighteningly dangerous and exhausting. At one impassable spot there was a man charging 5 yuan per person to climb a wooden ladder to help you up a cliff to get to the wall. There was also a lady with a booth selling cold Gatorade, water, beer, ice pops, and Snickers! Stuart was so astonished that someone would haul all that stuff up that extreme mountain to sell it for 7 times the normal price that he caved and bought a Snickers!
After hiking extensively over the old wall, we came to the highly repaired Mutianyu wall. It was laughably safe even though it was still difficult hiking. It was like going through a time portal back a few hundred years. Of course there were hundreds of tourists on this part while we only saw a few other people on the unmaintained part. Although the security cameras and speakers blaring advertisements were a bit out of place it seemed!!
When we finally left the Great Wall some four hours after we started, we had to descend an insane staircase all the way down the mountain. around a few thousand feet! We were so tired that our legs could hardly handle that!
A picture is worth a thousand words, so I'll stop here and provide some pictures of our wonderful trip.
Pictures of the Jiankou Great Wall
A few pictures of the Mutianyu section to show the contrast!