Hiking and Sleeping on the Great Wall

We had packed up, cleared out of the room and breakfasted all by 8am, and Gary and Lara were waiting for us, on time, in the lobby. It was Gary's (the owner) day off, so Lara, a recent Tourism grad from university in her home province of Sichuan, would be our guide. We learned that ours would be a private group (just the four of us and the guide) which suited us fine. We piled into the van and the driver headed north. Lara decided we should stop and see the Bird's Nest (olympic stadium) on the way out of town rather than the way back, as she knew we would be tired the next day. She was right.

The Bird's Nest was very cool to see in person, much bigger than we realized from seeing it on TV. We didn't get to go inside, but it was still neat to see it, as well as the Water Cube where Michael Phelps made history. 

It was very cold in Beijing, and since arriving we had been a little apprehensive about hiking and sleeping on the Great Wall. As far as we understood, we would sleep in one of the many watchtowers which dotted the wall. We would have sleeping bags and mats provided, and we would be inside a room with a roof above us, but with no heat or fires. The website had mentioned something about a nearby hotel which was used as a backup in the event of inclement weather, and I think we were secretly hoping for that - we could have the best of both worlds: hiking on the wall all day, and sleeping in a bed in a heated room all night! But Lara soon dispelled us of that notion; she had led a group the previous weekend, which had been just as cold, and they slept in the tower, and it was cold (she didn't sugarcoat that) but they survived. So at least we could now resign ourselves to our fate and get on with enjoying it.

We drove for about 2 hours to our starting point, while I napped in the back of the van most of the way. And then, on the outskirts of a small village, we stopped suddenly, the doors opened, and a warmly dressed woman in a red wool jacket climbed in. We were told nothing about who this person was or why we had stopped to pick her up. We had become accustomed to this in China: it was partly due to language challenges, but also partly cultural, but we often felt that we were on a "need to know basis".  It seems that you are often expected to follow along, with no questions asked or instructions offered, and anything you need to know will be made clear when and if you need to know it. This happens at restaurants, hotels, museums, and even private tour groups. 

We exited the main rode and drove along a smaller road for another 15 minutes or so, with some dialogue between the driver and the woman we had picked up. We had our first glimpses of the wall, with towers perched on hill crests stretching off to the distance. Then we stopped abruptly, all eyes turned to look at us, and Lara (who spoke decent English) asked if we wanted to do a 6-hour hike or 4-hour hike. All the information we'd been given said that we would do a 6-hour hike on day 1, it was what we had signed up for, so Wendy and I looked at each other and replied "6-hour hike" in unison. This having been decided, we then made a U-turn, and drove for 15 minutes back the way we had just come. No questions asked, no explanations offered, though at some point towards the end of the hike the next day I managed to glean from Lara that the normal "6-hour hike" usually only takes about 4 hours, so we actually ended up doing a few miles more than planned...which was fine with us.

Back on the main road we stopped outside a toll station to make a last public bathroom break before starting out. Walking back across the road, under a cold and gray sky, on the desolate outskirts of a small village somewhere in northern China, with a dozen or so locals milling about, waiting for a bus, staring at us (something else we have become accustomed to in China) I had a lonely, apprehensive feeling. WTF were we doing here? Lara finally introduced the woman to us as "a local farmer" (and she was thereafter referred to by the children as "The Farmer") and explained that she would be accompanying us on the first leg of the hike because "it could be dangerous" without her. No questions as to what exactly this meant, no explanation offered. This didn't help to put my mind at ease.

Back in the van, we drove into the village, and turned onto a small lane. Walking down the lane was the most iconic old Chinese man I've seen here, hunched over his walking stick, wearing his blue-gray Chinese-pajamas suit, chin jutting and lips sucked in over his toothless gums. He didn't seem to notice us driving past.

And then we stopped, got out of the van, put on our backpacks, and headed out. The driver would meet us at our destination. We walked up into the hills above the village, and quickly passed a number of dilapidated old brick buildings, which Lara told us was an old army barracks. We hiked up and up and we could see the wall above us, snaking along the ridge as far as we could see, demarcating our trail. And then we reached it. It was very deteriorated where we started out and we had to follow a trail next to it for a while, but soon we were able to scramble up and begin walking along the top of the wall. 

The hike was amazing. One vista after another opened up, each more amazing than the last, with always the wall snaking out along the ridge top as far as we could see behind us and ahead of us. The kids were in heaven, and though we ended up hiking over 8 miles that day (seeing only a handful of other people the entire time) they never tired or complained. The wall was unrestored, but in most places it was in good enough condition for us to walk along the top of it. One area was impassable and we had to divert down a trail into a narrow valley, and hike back up another valley to rejoin it. The valleys were all farmed, mostly with corn, which had been recently harvested. We saw old people working in the fields, and we were struck by how things had probably changed very little in that valley over the last few millennia or so. There were piles of corn stalks everywhere, all of which had been gathered by hand, some of which had been partially burned for reasons I'm not sure, and the smell of burnt corn combined with that of the tilled red earth. 

At one point later we passed an abandoned farm house, and we couldn't resist going in to take a peek. It was a low-slung mud-walled dwelling set against one side of a very narrow valley. Just like Wang Lung's original house in The Good Earth, which Wendy and I had both just read, it consisted of three rooms: the main room, which was about 10 ft x 10 ft, with a brick-walled stove, and nothing else, and one bedroom off to each side, each smaller than the main room, each with a 3 ft or so high adobe platform which was the bed. The grass-thatched roof hung low, and was blackened from years of smoke. The walls were papered with newspapers, as had been the wood-latticed "windows". The floors were hardened dirt. There was a wooden outhouse and a rock-lined well outside. And that's about it. It was truly amazing to step into this ordinary peasant's home, and to imagine that not too many years ago an entire family would have lived and worked here, and to think that most Chinese people have lived in homes just like this for millennia, and many still do. 

On the last segment of that day we reached a fully restored section of the wall. The unrestored section had been very cool, but it was amazing to walk on this restored section and see how the wall would have looked when originally constructed hundreds of years ago. The towers were also restored, and David and Emma had fun running around them, climbing to the second level on the two story ones, and playing hide and seek between the pillars. In one of these towers we encountered a group of 4 Chinese, each armed with an enormous and expensive looking camera, and they pounced on Emma and David and proceeded to pose and photograph them for 20 minutes! At one point David was getting tired of it, and I snuck away with him to play Mongol-invader fighting in another part of the tower, leaving Emma to handle the photoshoot (she seemed to be enjoying it). A couple minutes later two of the women found us, literally shoved me aside, and began snapping away at David again. I've never seen anything like it. It literally went on for 20 minutes, and the four of them must have each taken several hundred photos of our children! The man gave me his card, which Lara said indicated that he was a professional photographer. I'm supposed to email him to get copies of the pictures, but I haven't yet.

Finally we were done, and we walked down into a small village and we were seated (outdoors) and quickly offered tea and beer. Once we stopped hiking it became very cold, so Wendy and I bundled up with everything we had, but Emma and David had already started playing with a few of the local children, so they didn't get cold at all (David was sweaty!). Another tour group joined us for dinner, and we had a great time getting to know all of them. There were two families from Australia, one with two boys and one with two girls, so Emma and David had a great time playing with all of them. It was surreal to be sitting out on the main street of this tiny village, illuminated by a single bulb hanging on a wire behind our table, eating the (mainly vegetarian) local feast which had been prepared for us, shivering as we drank our ice cold beers (which, by the way, the locals thought was crazy, as they prefer their beer hot!), but it wasn't the lonely, apprehensive feeling I'd had in the morning, it was the good kind of surreal. An old man shuffled up and sat down in a small room behind us to slurp his bowl of noodles. I took a small video of him as he posed for what he apparently thought was a photograph. He was very nice and complimented us on our children and then shuffled back off.

We made our way back up to the wall, and along to the tower where we would sleep. We were given two sleeping bags and two mats apiece, and managed to stay plenty warm and relatively comfortable during the night. Because our group was smaller (and our guide more assertive) we slept in the small wooden room which had been built on top of the tower, which was fully sealed off, while the larger group slept one floor below us, in the actual tower, which had windows open to the elements. They survived as well, though a few who slept under the windows got a bit wet when it rained during the night, and one guy had a rude awakening in the early morning hours when something scurried across his chest! 

We were all up early the next day, with hot coffee and cold cereal to revive us, and in good spirits all around after surviving our night on the wall. We only hiked a few miles that morning, but with some very steep up and down sections of the wall. It was very foggy and dramatic looking back down a steep section we had just summited, or looking up at the next one to come. Emma and David spent the whole morning walking and talking with their new friends, as did Wendy and I. Finally we came to the end of our hike, bought a celebratory beer from a vendor on the wall, took some group photos, and headed back to the van for more napping on the way back to Beijing.