Beijing - The Great Wall of China

Today we visited the Great Wall of China.  (I am making the post from Tower 9 of The Great Wall. Rik went ahead while I rest my ankle.)

The wall stretches 8850km from East Sea to the West in the desert.  It took about 2000 years to build and half the workers were killed along the way.  It reminds me of one of those Heritage Minutes about the one dead Chinese man for every mile of the railway in Canada. Same with The Great Wall!  (Incidentally, the workers who were still alive kept building the wall around the ones who dropped dead.  If they had stopped for a funeral each time a worker died, they'd still be building it.)

During the hundreds and hundreds of years that the Chinese emperors kept building, I wonder if any of them were thinking "Mamma Mia.  someone will surely come along and get over this thing.  But I can't be the one to stop it now!"   

Someone wasn't counting on the tenacity of Ghengis Khan.  I guess you could say the wrath of Khan breached the great wall.  Anyway, you can see it from space.  That's pretty cool.

The spot we visited is a 5km section of Huairou County at Mutianyu.  It's very well-preserved, considering how old it is.  There are 22 towers Rik got to 17 of them. 

 

There were a few places you could stop for refreshments on the way. We stopped at one so I could get a coffee. It was a good break - I had a coffee and Rik got a cup of hot milk with tea leaves. Weird but common. 

After a couple of hours of climbing and exploring the wall, we took a toboggan ride down to the base. People here are super cautious and slow as cold molasses. It was the opposite of going on a toboggan ride in Switzerland. Still, better than walking. 

- Ruth