Day 29: A Visit to the Really, Really Great Wall.
According to our guide, the Great Wall of China is the Number One tourist attraction in this country … and I believe it. After the heat and the pressing crowds of Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, we all were a bit put off at the thought of coping with more and even bigger crowds. Not to worry, we were assured: we’re going to a section of The Wall that is farther out of town, but will be less crowded.
That was the good news. The bad news? Getting there meant slogging through more than 90 minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic. Thankfully, there was A/C, but it just cooled the smog before sucking it into our lumbering bus. Our guide remained unfailingly cheerful, however, assuring us that we had missed morning rush hour, but then noting apologetically that we would probably be in the middle of the heavy going-home traffic on our way back.
Finally, there it was. Climbing a steep slope, swinging on upwards past one of the watch towers, and continuing through the haze and over a distant ridge out of sight. Just these few miles of wall are nothing short of astonishing, but try to imagine: when finished and intact, it stretched for some 4,000 miles! (By the way, it is not true that the Great Wall is visible from outer space.)
This is one of a dozen or more very ancient cannon that are positioned along several stretches of The Wall here, all aimed at the valley below. This would have been a marginal photo until a little girl hopped up and struck a feisty pose for her father … and instantly turned it into an interesting shot in several different ways.
This photo was taken about halfway up to the top of this stretch of The Wall and I will tell you without any apologies that I was lucky to get this far. As I sat there huffing and puffing, I had fun imagining a Chinese non-com back in the 14th century summoning one of his soldiers and barking an order:
“Qang! Run up there and tell Lao that dinner will be at 7:00 tonight, not 6:30. Hop to it!”
As I was sitting and catching my breath in one of those little niches in the wall, this Chinese woman with a little boy about four-years-old rushed up to me and thrust him onto my lap … frantically gesturing that she wanted to take a photo of me holding her child. I was happy to oblige – actually, too surprised not to – the photo was taken, and the little boy scurried back to his mother.
But now, a queue of parents and babies began forming and, before I knew what was happening, there were more kids on my lap and more photos taken. I felt like a department store Santa working at fast-forward!
Finally, I was able to wave them off, break away and head back down The Wall and into some shade. Later I asked our guide about the experience. He laughed and said that those people were probably from one of the outer provinces where they rarely if ever see a white face and they wanted a photo of the strange-looking man they had seen during their visit to the Big City.
I’m flattered … I think.
