The Long Wall

In China, the name for the Great Wall is apparently The Long Wall. This feels like modest understatement. It is certainly long. But it's also Great and quite Magnificent and Beautiful and kind of Miraculous. Miraculous as in - how the hell did they do it? We visited the wall between Jinshanling and Simatai - six kilometres of wall which stretch up over a craggy ridgeline sitting atop of at times quite sheer drops with thick bush and steep inclines. How on earth did they get the bricks up there?

The answer I guess is manpower. They had a lot of people. But still. It's pretty mind bending.

Our bit of wall was a three hour drive out of Beijing, so slightly less touristy than the bits closer to the city. It was worth the six-hour round trip to see the parts of the wall that had not been rebuilt - crumbling and in parts just big piles of rocks and bricks. We walked through 22 watch towers - as far as the eye could see the wall snaked away ahead and behind.

Our tour group picked up a local guide whose key purpose seemed to be to ensure the group all got to the destination watch tower at Simatai in time to be picked up by our minibus. He would remain at the back to make sure no one got left behind. So it became the lot of this poor fellow to trail Brett, Jeremy and myself for pretty much the entire six kilometres as we quickly fell to the back of the group as we slowly meandered along, breathing it all in and photographing the wall and its populations of insects and birds in minutiae. He became like a secret service agent, loitering behind bricks and peeping through watch tower windows to unobtrusively shadow our progress. However, eventually his frustration shone through and he left the unobtrusive part behind. Finally, his secret service persona was dropped and he was reduced to barking at me - you must walk fast! You have six more watch towers! 17 minutes!

Meanwhile Brett and Jerry were off photographing squashed millipedes* or some such. I could only shrug helplessly - I have to wait for the others. Secret Service Local Guide glowered crossly.

I think the Great Wall is completely Great. I loved it.

(* - Someone say squashed millipedes? Why oh why do the thousands of beetles and millipedes linger on the steps of the great wall? Only to be squashed by exhausted tourists, too tired to dodge the bugs. Are there bodies of workers in the great wall? Perhaps we will never know, but it is definitely 3% squashed bugs.)