"The Great Wall of China"

As US President Nixon said as he visited The Great Wall of China in 1972 during the Ping-Pong diplomacy conference. "It reallyis a great wall." I thought this comment was quite inadequate before I went there myself. With all the branches of the Wall, they have figured out that it is 8,851.8 km (5,500.3 miles). The sight when you are up there is just not possible to describe it. And in Nixon's defence, millions of tourists think the same, because The Great Wall is the world's most visited tourist attraction. According to the people running souvenir shops around the wall, there is a Chinese saying that goes like this: "You are not a real man before you have climbed the Great Wall of China." How convenient for them! They are the ones selling T-shirts saying: "I climbed the Great Wall!"

Weather or not the saying is actually an old Chinese one or not, does really not matter much. When visiting China, The Great Wall is an absolute and irremovable part of the itinerary. Me and the Swedes did not want to pay a lot of money to go on the organized "follow the green umbrella" -tours, and figured out how to get up to the Wall by local bus. The morning before we went up there, we tried to get on the public transport, but the last bus to Badaling had left at 11 AM, so we had to come back the next day. So we did, and the bus left the station at 9AM, with us in it. The price to get up there was 12 RMB, and the entrance to the Wall was 40 RMB, so our trip totaled around 70 RMB, that is about 150 RMB less than the organized tours.

The first thing we could see when we got off the bus was a coffee shop with Swedish and Norwegian signs, and a lot of foreign flags. We got up to the ticket booth, and bought our tickets. We could go which way we wanted, so we looked both left and right, to see if we could figure out where there were the least people. The right side was not as steep as the left one, and it was packed with people. The Left side was almost empty. An easy choice! We headed up the left side, the sun was about to break through the fog that hung low, covering most of the mountains in the horizon. Only the peaks were in sight, and on many of them we could see the guard towers on the wall sticking up. The whole scene was obscure, it was so impressive that it almost felt mythological. We felt we were a part of History (With a capital "H"). As we walked up, there were so may picture opportunities that we did not when to stop shooting. As we climbed the steep steps, none the same height as the previous, we really had to pay attention to where we placed our feet. If you fall backwards here, you will not stop rolling down, down, and down, before you lay six feet below. There were a few others on "our" side of the wall, but we could only imagine how it would be in the summer when looking over to the people who went right. It was a long worm of colored jackets. In the summer there would probably be thousands more, even on the left side.

The Wall was built centuries ago to protect China from different armies of the north. Construction already started in the 8th century BC, but it was first about 200 years BC that the extensive building began.(When the first dynasty of China, then Qin Dynasty was established.) The Wall that is there today is part of the Ming Dynasty's efforts to defend themselves. This did not really work as well as they had hoped, but they did build the Wall solid. Even if it at some places is falling apart, most of it is standing. The areas tourists are allowed to walk on are of course refurbished to a standard where there should be no danger of injury. Imagine how bad it would be if a whole heard of sheep in red hats, following a leader with a megaphone and a flag, were to fall down as the Wall collapsed down the mountainside below them.

When you get to the end of the tourist area, they have built a wall preventing you from going further. The wall is accompanied by a few interesting signs, and a lot of barbed wire. The signs say things like "Tourists no entry", "Do not climb the barbed wire", and so on. We were debating for a long time what the policemen further back on the wall would do if they caught us climbing to the other side. We knew there were cameras pointing our way, but that was quite far away. So we decided to climb the wall, and at least go down on the other side. So we did. At this time, the sun was warming a lot, there was no wind, and everything was silent, except for a loudspeaker in the distance, playing some traditional Chinese music. It was the same kind that annoyed us in restaurants here in China, but up here, it felt right! We just hung out there for a while, eating some small snacks we brought. We sat up against the wall and relaxed for a while, and every once in a while some Chinese tourists came and took pictures of us, laughing. They thought it was funny that we had climbed down there, and they were probably wondering how we would get back up again. But we are a lot taller than the Chinese, so we could reach high enough to pull our self up, if we jumped.

We were all enjoying the scenery so much that I really have no words to describe it. Of course we took pictures here also, but The Great Wall is one of those places where taking pictures should be prohibited, so that everyone has to come see it with their own eyes. Photographs do just not capture the magnificent of this amazing artwork of nature and human engineering.