As threatened, we stormed the Great Wall of China like a Mongol horde today. We took the bus from Beijing proper to Badaling in the morning (which looks like the name of that stripclub from the Sopranos, but isn’t pronounced that way). After about an hour on the road, we were dropped off a few hundred meters from the wall itself, and it was on.

About halfway up.

While we were in the courtyard below the entrance to the wall, an Australian family and I were brought together by our shared amazement at the tenacity of all the trinket-sellers in the area. They hustled, they worked hard, they understood ‘no’ to be a negotiating position, and there were a ton of them. The family had just come from the Great Wall, and the father remarked that to the north it was a treacherous climb, his daughter ended up tweaking her knee and getting a nosebleed, people were slipping and falling over on the ice, and that they’d made it about as far as the fifth of eight towers before they had to turn back to rejoin their tour group. I looked up at the Wall above and got a little nervous at that point.

“Hey, tourist asshole with the hat! Want to pay 10 yuen to get your picture taken with the camel?”

Turns out Australians are wimps–or at least this family was, anyway. The climb was a little challenging in places due to the ice and snow that was still hanging around from the weekend’s storm, and it was pretty cold, but by far my biggest problem turned out to be heat dissapation. Having heard that it’d be cold and windy on the Wall, I was sporting many layers and was sweating like an idiot by the second tower. Other than that, it was a piece of cake.

This is about as crowded as it got up there today. I hear it’s much worse at more reasonable times of the year to visit.

There’s a rollercoaster-style cable ride down the Wall from about halfway up to the parking lot that I wanted to take on the way down. Michelle made the point that real hackers will walk down the Wall the old-fashioned way. I said I thought we proved our manliness (or womanliness, as the case may be) by walking up. She said we ought to save the money. Not having a good response to that, we ended up avoiding the ride, but I think I won in the end by blowing most of the money we saved on a palpably fake Rolex on the way down.

Next time, we’ll take the ride.

The steepest part of the wall we climbed.

Obviously, the wall’s an amazing feat of civil engineering. Beyond that, I was struck by how short the amenities were. I hit my head in the archways in some of the towers. It was like the shower stall in Andres and Vivan’s guest bathroom. Ha ha. Also, check out the handrails in these two pics. Michelle and I are in more or less the exact same place. I had to squat down to use the railings most places–although upon reflection the handrail placement was probably less for convenience and more to avoid a metal railing extending above the crenellations on the wall.

“Anyone know where the adult-sized handrails are located?”

As if I needed any more reason to think I’m Shaq, a couple more people wanted photos today. Here’s my new buddy–I didn’t catch his name but he was a monk from India. Because he was a man of God, I forgave him for asking me to take off my hat before the photo was taken.

I’m the one with the hat in his hand.

We ended up not going south, which was a longer walk but with much less of a climb, as we could see everything from the top of the Wall in the northern direction. We headed back to the parking lot where the bus let us off, but the busses going back to Beijing were arriving full and the lot was full of people looking to catch the same bus we wanted. Instead, we hopped in an amateur unlicenced taxi–these are all over the place in Beijing–and headed the opposite direction to Yanqing, a town a few miles away where the bus route we wanted originated. It was easy to get a seat on the bus there.

It turns out Michelle knows all the cool tricks in the area because her family had lived in Yanqing for years and she grew up there. Thank heaven, or we’d probably still be fighting with the milling crowd to get a seat on the bus.