Adventures in Asia: Great Wall of China

This morning we took the subway to the Lama Temple stop (you can see Lama Temple poking up behind the trees across the road).

Here we met up with Fred and Heidi, the owners of China Hiking.  They had kindly set up a Great Wall group hike for today specifically because I had requested it, and we were joined by a couple of Swedish girls, who had taken the train from St. Petersburg to Beijing.  The four of us, plus our guide Heidi and a driver, left Beijing in a minivan and drove northwest out of the city for about two hours, along highways and past other parts of the wall.

We reached a little village in the mountains where we stopped to eat lunch at a local restaurant.

After lunch we drove a little ways out of the village and to the trail head.

Heidi, our guide, the two Swedish girls and Andrea and I set out along a gravel farm road while our van and driver headed off to meet us "on the other side."

Quickly the road ended and we were on a narrow, overgrown trail.  At one point the brush was so thick that even Heidi lost the trail momentarily.  We made our way up the hill, switch backing occasionally, and getting further and further away from civilization.

Eventually we could see the wall above us.

 And then, after about 45 minutes of hiking, mostly uphill and through brush, we reached the wall.

We walked on top of the wall for a couple of incredible hours.  We literally had the wall entirely to ourselves, and more than that, it felt like we had the entire mountain range to ourselves.  There were literally stretches during which we could see no signs of humanity other than the wall and our little group--and this just two hours outside of one of the largest cities in the world in the most populous country in the world.

The portion of the wall we walked on is actually what was the wall's base, on which fortifications had been built but are now gone.  Unlike some of the normal tourist destinations, none of the wall has been restored.  Japanese soldiers removed some stones from here during World War II, and during the Cultural Revolution Chinese people were encouraged to dismantle the wall, but nonetheless it is in remarkably good condition.

It extended as far as I could see both behind and in front of us, a ribbon of white along the ridge of the otherwise mostly green mountains.

Eventually we descended the wall and began our descent down the other side of the mountain.

This trail was not quite so rugged, and we passed several types of purple flowers and berries on our way down.

We descended for about half an hour or so before we started encountering farmers' fields.  When we finally reached the road, the first person we saw was a farmer leading his mule.  It seemed like a picture from another era.

A few minutes later, we were waiting for our ride . . .

. . .  when another farmer walked by.

So our Great Wall hike turned out to not just give us a great time on the Great Wall, but also provided a glimpse of agricultural life in the mountains northwest of Beijing.  Once back in the van, we continued descending through several more villages.

Most of the homes in these villages had solar-heated hot water tanks on the roof, such as this one:

All of us (driver excepted) fell asleep during our drive back to Beijing, but I was awake long enough to be extremely impressed with the efficiency of the highway/ring road system.  We were not stuck in traffic once, even though it was around 17:00-18:00.

Back in Beijing we took the subway back to Qianmen, where we celebrated our hike with a Peking duck.

Its presentation was much different than we expected, and at first we were not sure what to do with the wraps, cucumber, and celery, but we managed.  It was so good!