The Great Wall (...a memory from 2012)

I had an opportunity to visit China recently.  My business would be mid-week, so I arranged to return on a Sunday, so I could take Friday and Saturday off to do some sightseeing.  It would be a shame to travel so far without taking at least a day to look around.  Since I would be in the Beijing area, I decided that I could not miss “The Wall”…and indeed, it was “Great” !

There are many sections to the wall.  It's over 3000 miles (5000 km) long and it crosses rather varied terrain.  The Chinese have fixed up several sections, restoring them so they are safe to walk on, and building huge visitors centers so many thousands can access this important cultural treasure. 

The section I visited is known as The Badaling Great Wall.  The facilities are very nice and resemble what you would see in a well-developed National Park in the USA.  The section just above is not part of Badaling, but rather another section that you can see as you approach it.

No Mongols approaching today, just hoards of visitors.  As we drove in, we passed an entire parking lot that at that hour, was still empty.  With as many people on the wall as there were, I cannot imagine what it would be like to visit on a crowded day.

As you walk from the parking area, you leave the souvenir vendors and enter the complex, with several nice museums and visitors centers.  Walking on, you come to a nicely developed area with a hotel and restaurants, just before you enter the wall area.  You climb up stairs onto the top of what must have been a large barracks, and start climbing the wall itself.  When they say “climbing”…they mean it.

As you climb from one Watch Tower to the next,

the wall creeps up and down the ridges of the hills,

 sometimes surprisingly steeply.

Imagine soldiers running through these narrow openings in the towers, along the top of the wall, positioning themselves to defend it from attackers.  The terrain below the wall is quite rough, but troops up on top can move quickly, like on a highway, to wherever they are needed.  There are no roadways at the foot of the wall, the crews working on restorations use mules to haul their supplies to work sites.

This tower looks like it had a roof that served at the top floor of the tower,

 the large room was likely used as a barracks for soldiers.

As you climb, you can look back down and see the visitor’s center at the base.

One of the cooler aspects of the wall’s design is the way it snakes off down one ridge line and up another. 

I was wondering how one would get to this section of the wall,

 when I figured out that it is part of the Badaling section,

you just have to go way up, down and around to get to it.

Then I noticed a couple of intrepid young girls who must have arrived early and raced all the way over there, well ahead of the rest of the day’s visitors.

My young cousins only had one question:  “How tall is the wall ?” 

At Badaling, I would say from 30 to 40 feet.

A cool place to visit !!

The view from a 2-hour climb…fantastic !

So, keep a close eye out...

You never know when the Mongols will be back !

-          Mark W. Laughlin