Day 36

Today I went to The Great Wall. The part we visited was called Badaling. It was about a 2 hour bus ride there. It is the more touristy part of the wall as a lot of it has been updated for the hikers’ safety and appearance. It was a nice day to hike, as it was cool but the fog/haze that was blocking out the sun also made the distance pictures very hard to take. It was still simply amazing that they could build such a huge and rugged defense system in 5^th century. The wall borders the northern side of China and the south of Mongolia. The entire wall stretches roughly 6300 km (3900 mi). They say that building the wall was such hard and physically demanding work that one person died for every meter of the wall that was built. The terrain that it was built over is insane. At one point, I was standing 5 steps farther along the wall then my friend and my head was level with his feet. It was about a 6 foot drop over 4 feet. It was definitely a tough climb at times. However, some of it was pretty flat of had a small grade. Not all of it was steps but it sure felt like it. I really got a hard work out. One of my thoughts while hiking the wall was I am glad we did not have this near my hometown we surely would have had track or cross country practice on it. I did race a kid to the top of one of the climbs. I had a definite advantage with my longer legs. An interesting fact about the steps of the wall is that they are all different heights and sizes. This was done so that the enemy soldiers would trip trying to climb it but the Chinese soldiers would know the steps from the repetitious climbs they had. This would definitely have worked as I clipped my toe several times. We took a break at one of the towers to eat some bread that we had packed and just as we were leaving one of the names scratched into the wall caught my eye. It had two Chinese characters at the beginning and some English letters after it. When one of the Chinese characters was covered up, it looked exactly like my name. The students I was with could not understand why is said it was my name because they just saw them as Chinese characters. So I covered it up and they just thought that was the coolest thing. It was definitely cool to see but I am worn out from all the hills and the heat.