ChinaBlog Day 43

I have been to The Great Wall and must now submit to the most ancient of Chinese rituals. There is an old saying here: One who rides back of stone snake must return home to blog. It is so long-standing and pervasive that there is even evidence of it influencing the Japanese in this recently-uncovered primitive haiku:
Foreign monsters throng
The green mountains divided
Now go home and blog
I find myself part of a tradition few get to experience. And yet it's immediate familiarity makes me question the very nature of this post. Am I going to just write another blog about how amazing the Great Wall of China is? Really?
--Yes. Yes I am very much. Why? Because it's amazing. Really REALLY amazing. So amazing, in fact, that it has its own cell phone towers just so visitors can call home and say, "Hey, whatcha doin? Oh, laundry? That's nice, but I'M ON THE FREAKING GREAT WALL OF CHINA RIGHT NOW. Seeya." *click* I didn't do that, however I did call my dad and wish him a happy Father's Day. It was Father's Day for me, but it isn't Father's Day for him until right now. Confused? Well, just to be safe, I'll say 'Happy Father's Day dad'! There. That should cover all my bases. So, back to the wall.
--Since this post will be entirely about the Great Wall of China from here on out, and it takes me about three minutes to write 'the Great Wall of China', I'm going to hereby shorten it to UJDWC, which stems from a nickname I gave it at the time (Utterly Jaw-Dropping Wall of China). The UJDWC is so impressive that there were at least three times when I literally gasped audibly. The first was when a swarm of bees flew into our cable car enclosure. The second was when I saw the wall for the first time. And the third was when I realized that there were four near-vertical wall sections between me and the car. It turned out that the bees were more like hornets, and a good frantic screaming scramble to wedge ourselves underneath the benches seemed to ward them off. This slow, creaky, slow cable car system is designed to circumvent the 40 minute road hike up to the entrance. UJDWC is built along mountain ridges, for obvious defensive reasons, so just arriving at the gate doesn't get you even within sighting distance of the one man-made thing that can be seen from space in daylight. We opted for the slow, creaky, slow, dizzyingly high and vulnerable-to-aerial-attack contraption that is half ski-lift and half death-trap to quicken our pace to UJDWC. I think it still took 40 minutes. What's nice is it lets you off at one of the towers, so you go through a 500 year old castle-like structure before the UJDWC is revealed to you in it's treacherous splendor all at once as you emerge from the darkened stone cavern.
--What a day to do this hike. It's 4 miles long, and takes 4 hours. It's a set route along the wall that enables you to hit every major ticket stop before getting to the end. Our driver dropped us off, wrote a note in Chinese, waved, and left. There was some feeling that he would probably be there at the other end when we arrived, but it wasn't completely obvious at that point. We figured that our rockin cell signal would eventually save us.
--UJDWC is in various states of disrepair and newness, and was obviously built by whomever happened upon the site over its lengthy period of construction. Its width, height, slope, lean, stairs, ramps, cobblestones, and towers vary so violently from one patch to another that just keeping yourself from toppling over is a heavy task. And several places are so steep that you crawl up the steps. Also, there are essentially two general types of stairs; ferret-sized and rhino-sized. Why they couldn't just assume that it would be mostly people who used the wall, I don't know. I guess they were just covering all their bases. But it means that any human visitor must use the full capacities of their frontal cortex to correctly place bottom-of-foot onto tread-of-stair, as it is either 3 or 16 inches above or below its previous resting place. We (Matt, Jessica, Mark, and I) must be brilliant, because we managed to get through the four hour hike without more than a single ruptured knee and a slightly broken nose.
--The views of UJDWC from UJDWC are astonishing. I took a million pictures of essentially the same thing in different configurations during the hike, and they can now be seen on flickr in case you're a glutton for punishment. No, seriously, they're awesome.
--What was not awesome was the agonizing brutality of the hike. We were constantly drenched in sweat and locals trying to sell us Cokawaterpostcardtshirt like it was gold nuggets at a clearance sale. One woman actually stood in front of us and watched us eat our packed lunch ready to pounce when it appeared any of us was getting to the bottom of our water. 'Cold Cokawater! Cold Cokawater! Postcardshirt!' 'NO. I have NO MONEY. The UJDWC ticket kiosks TOOK IT ALL. YOU'RE WASTING YOUR TIME.' Etc. to no avail. I ended up giving her my bag of curry-flavored candied peanuts (these, as you might imagine, were not exactly what I thought I was buying when I got them at the store) which she promptly transferred into a ziplock and tried to sell to Mark. We eventually figured out that when we had gathered a sufficient following of Cokawaters we could just stop and wait for an inevitable 20 person German tour group to flow by, and they would fall into the bigger mass like moons to a gas giant so that we could be left relatively at peace for a half hour or so. In all it was a quiet, pleasant, utterly draining day.
--So now I'm home after climbing the Great Wall of China, blogging about the Great Wall of China, and I feel at peace with the experience. All is one, the cycle has been completed. I highly recommend you take a trip out this way to see this place. It's one of those few landmarks that's actually better than you expect it to be in person. Like Yosemite, Paris, and In-N-Out.
--My time in China is beginning to come to a close. There's so much left to see and do, so I might just return in the not-too-distant future. We'll see.
-c