Day 214 - A mission to the Simatai section of the Great Wall.

Our adventures today took us all the way to the Great Wall of China - the wall itself stretches from Liaoning province to Jiayuguan - literally from ocean to desert - and was started over 2000 years ago with an original purpose of keeping out nomads and invading armies. The part of the wall that we decided to travel to is at a place called Simatai, which is a mere 19km section of the wall and has 16 watch towers (unfortunately we could only trek to 12 of them because the government has deemed the next sections too perilous for public access). An interesting feature of the wall at Simatai is that there are "obstacle walls", which are small walls within the main wall itself - this is for extra protection for those crafty ones who make it over the initial wall. We were thankful for the amazing views on arrival - especially given the huge effort we went through to get there! The hostel was offering transport at a price of 180 yuan per person, but we managed to do it for just over 200 for the both of us - though it required a 6am wake up, 3 subway trips, several kilometres of walking to the bus station (including lots of back-tracking), a 1 1/2 bus, and then an hour long mini-van ride through the snowy mountains to get to the wall itself - what a mission!!

When we finally arrived the excitement that had been brewing during the hours of travelling overflowed, and we took off at a rapid pace to get some of the wall under our feet! We spent the next 3 hours scaling the unbelievably steep, slippery and icy wall - one of the bonuses of coming to the wall in winter is that you trade hordes of tourists for a cold, snow-lined wall - it was nice to have a tourist attraction almost all to ourselves for a change!! On our way up we only saw 2 people and on the way down, a handful more! Walking to the east of Simatai we were faced with gruelling steps, crumbling watch-towers to explore and the barren but beautiful view to keep the camera clicking. To one side we had views of mist covered mountains, and to the other side we could see the winding wall that snakes up the Jinshanling section of the wall - whatever way we looked got the same reaction: wow!
At the top Adam conveniently 'overlooked' the sign prohibiting further exploration and the fine that goes with it if caught, and set off to claim a 13th watch-tower and climb along a part of the wall that was only 1 brick wide at parts and sheer drop-offs on either side. Due to time demands Adam's foray into the forbidden was limited and he had to turn back after 10 minutes of running!
The journey back down brought back memories of Tai Shan (Trinket and Wally will understand), though our descent only took an hour instead of half a day! We also cut some time off the walk back to our car by taking a flying fox over the river that separates two parts of the wall - though Liv took some serious convincing and had Adam do double checks on all the equipment (you never can be too sure!).

On the last leg of the walk we past a couple of men fishing through a hole in the ice that had taken over the bottom section of the river.

After a reverse trip back to Beijing - much easier when you know what you're doing and where you're going - we literally collapsed after a 10 hour adlibing mission.

Dinner tonight was at the nearest possible cheap restaurant where we ate under the watchful eye of Chairman Mao himslef!

Adlibing the Great Wall.