The Great Wall

Ugh – 0630 on a holiday morning! Still, it was to get about 150 km out of town to go and see The Great Wall.

After a couple of hours journey with the car (plus driver) we'd hired, we approached Simatai – one of the quieter gates of the Wall, but we weren’t able to stop there as it was closed for Health and Safety reasons (not anything I'd have ever expected to hear in China...) 

 Anyway a few kilometres away was another gate, Jin Shan Ling – a very quiet gate to the Wall, with hardly any tourists. This was a plus for us, as we could ramble at our own pace and not be bothered by loads of photo taking tourists (even though that’s exactly what we were!). 

The downside was that the pack of hyenas that hover around the foot of the climb had fewer pickings and latched onto us immediately. By hyenas, I mean these women with all this crappy tourist junk who followed us for a bit, all the time us saying “我不有 谢谢” (Don’t want, thanks) but they still followed, really close besides us, as if they were part of our walking group, not saying anything but occasionally smiling at us.

I kept waving them off, repeating the “no thanks” to them and eventually – after about 20 minutes – they get tired of following us and stay behind. This is nothing like other countries I have been where there are persistent sellers – at least after a swift and firm “NO” they leave you alone. Not these ones...

With the persistent bitches behind us, we climb the part of the wall here and it’s just amazing – stretches for miles (over 4000, actually). We walk about 2 of them in total, marvelling at the scenery and how long it use have taken to complete. Having walked a fair distance, we decided to settle down and have the beers that we’d bought at the base to enjoy up here when we spotted those women who’d been bothering us at the beginning. 

WTF?!

How did they get up here ahead of us? Maybe there was a secret money grabber tunnel passageway or something. Anyway, they said they’d been waiting for us for thirty minutes! 

WTF?!

We try to brush them off and they are having none of it – following us all along the Wall, and spoiling the experience. They'd probably go away if we'd bought something,  so I take a look and she produced with crap photo of the wall that I’d have not paid more than 50p for and says it’s 100RMB. £10! 

Fuck off you money grabbing bitch - you must think I am a complete idiot. So I tell her that I do NOT want anything from her and she needs to go away. Now. Edwin buys a book, and we think that’ll see them off, but it doesn’t – apparently we need to buy something off both of them. I raise my voice and tell them that I don’t want anything from them at all and walk off.

They still follow us like a bad smell. Adrian then gets cross with them and they eventually leave us alone. A little further on we come across some more who start the whole process again, so we take a bit of a detour to sit and drink the beer (actually we didn’t drink it there as the place stank of piss) but it avoided this set of persistent money grabbing bitches. Unfortunately, we didn’t realise that to take the cable car down to the base again, we’d have to go back through these women’s ‘camp’ and needless to say, one latched onto us, and even after showing her the book that we’d already bought and continuously repeating “我不有 谢谢”, she didn’t get it. 

Fortunately, she was distracted by something and we made our break away from her and scarpered towards the cable car station – it looked like we’d finally got rid of this one.

Time for that well deserved beer! However, what we had forgotten to bring with us was a bottle opener, so the guy that sold us the beer in the café gave us a set of chopsticks, saying we could open the beers with them. 

Yeah, right! I use my keys in the end which does the trick (and then notice that I have bent one of them and instantly fret that I won’t be able to get back into my flat ever again). The beer was delicious and well deserved, both from walking up and along the Wall, plus managing to dodge (almost) all the persistent money grabbing bitches, and we then get the cable car back down...

...to more women asking us to buy their stuff! By this time, it was really irritating, so after a quick lunch we head back to Beijing.

Despite the irritations - the Great Wall is exactly that - great. But I doubt you can see it from the moon... (not with all the smog anyway)