"The Great Wall of China...a real highlight"

Today I was up at 6.30am to visit The Great Wall of China! After the disappointment of not seeing the wall as we passed through it on the Trans-Mongolian railway line, I was not going to miss this trip for anything! The bus was to picked me up at 8.30am from outside the hotel so it was a relief when it arrived. I had purchased my ticket from the CITS for Y150 (£15.00) which is expensive for China, but I was not prepared to take the chance of not getting there.

The Great Wall of China

One of the main reasons for wanting to visit China in the first place, was to fulfil my dream to walk on top of the ’Great Wall’. This is the only man-made object that is visible from space and is four thousand one hundred and sixty three miles long. It has to be one of the most remarkable engineering feats of all time. The wall was constructed in ten years or so, around 220 BC by the first man to rule all of China, the emperor Qin Shihuang. Separate walls, constructed by earlier rulers to keep out marauding nomads, were linked up over the ten year period, and it is said that three hundred thousand slaves, peasants and political prisoners toiled to rebuild, and connect the earlier sections into a single barrier through the mountains on the northern frontier. An estimated one hundred and eighty thousand million cubic metres of earth was used to form the core of the original wall, and one of the building materials used was the bodies of the deceased workers!

One of the main uses of the wall was to transport men and equipment over the mountainous terrain that the ’wall’ crosses. There was a beacon tower system used to transmit the movement of enemy forces via smoke signals back to the capital, thus keeping the rulers informed. This beacon system proved extremely effective. During the subsequent centuries, the wall was neglected and abandoned and by A.D. 607, the wall had fallen into a state of disrepair until the Sui Dynasty began the task of reconstruction. It was during this period that no fewer than one million labourers were forced to work on the rebuilding and construction, and more than half of them perished.

During the Ming Dynasty A.D. 1368-1644 a determined effort was made to reshape the entire project and this time the wall was faced with bricks and stone slabs. Records show that sixty million cubic metres were used. This Ming project took over one hundred years to complete and the cost in resources and yet more human lives was astronomical. In A.D. 1957 the section at Badaling was restored as a tourist attraction and hand rails were fitted to help visitors climb up the steep stairways linking the watch towers together. This section of the wall is eight metres high and has a width of around nine metres at the top and nine and a half metres at the bottom. Originally the wall could accommodate five horsemen riding abreast, nowadays it is more like fifteen tourists!

The depiction of the ’Wall’ of an object of great beauty is actually a strange one, as it is really a symbol of tyranny, rather like, in my opinion the Berlin Wall. However reading about the wall before visiting it, gave me an insight to the history and although it was an amazing experience never to be forgotten, it was also a time for deep contemplation about the suffering caused by its construction.

On the way to the wall we had a guide to inform us all about the Great Wall and where we would be stopping and for how long. She spoke excellent English and was really nice to talk with during the journey. I made the mistake of asking her if she had once lived abroad as her English was so good, and was shocked when she explained that it was not possible for her to leave China for in a Communist country, one could leave only if your job warranted you leaving. I think that I had forgotten just where I was and when she told me this, it made me realise just how lucky I was to be there, visiting other parts of the world, a luxury that some people would never experience. During the journey, and later when we were walking together, she asked me many questions about the rest of the world and asked me what other countries I had visited. I carefully told her my experiences trying not to appear that I was ’bragging’. To see her face face when I mentioned Australia and New Zealand was something quite sad. She told me that she had met so many people from Australia and it was her dream place to visit, just as China was my dream place to visit

As we approached the Great Wall at Badaling, she informed us that the walk to the right along the wall would be less demanding than that of the left although, there would be far more people. I made the decision to go to the left and although it was a strenuous climb, it was very quiet and peaceful. My first impressions were that the wall was incredible! I could not believe that the terrain would be as steep and severe as it was. I had assumed the wall would traverse rolling hillsides instead it climbed almost vertical up the sides of a mountains. The actual building process must have been hell.

During my walk it was very, very quiet and for most of the time Katrine and I were the only ones along certain sections, while looking down across the valley onto the other areas, there were obviously many hundreds of people walking on those sections. The temperature, although not as cold as Siberia, was still bitter and I was glad to have my snow ski jacket and thick gloves as well as a hat. The wall was covered in thick ice and for some of the time was quite treacherous under-foot. Without any doubt, this was one of the high-lights of the trip.

Read Neils complete adventure here.