Weekend Adventures (Part Two)

** New pictures from the past weekend uploaded to Webshots **

Sunday morning we met our driver at 7:30am for the 40-minute ride to the Great Wall (长成) at HuangYa Guan Pass. Dr. Lan had helped us arrange transportation the previous day and our driver agreed to take us to the wall, pick us up, take us back to the hotel to grab our bags and then to the train station. All for a little under $15.

The wall at HuangYa Guan was not nearly as touristy as the section at Badaling, which was fun. The whole day we saw mostly Chinese tourists with the exception of two Englishmen we ran into at one particularly steep climb. The wall here was less restored, more remote and more rugged. With fewer people and virtually no other westerners, it was almost like having our own section of the wall to explore.

One of the first things we noticed was that the Great Wall was also much steeper here. Our legs, still recovering from countless hundreds of stairs at Pan Shan the day before, were not as happy about the climb. The scenery and sense of adventure was well worth it, however. I still find it amazing that a wall over 3,000 miles long could be built and defended two millenia ago, but when you see the elevation that some of the wall is built upon, the feat seems even more incredible. One section of the wall did dead end as it ran into a nearly vertical section of the mountain, that proved to be too steep for building. There are many rumors as to how many workers died building the wall, even going up to unrealistic numbers of one worker per every few stones. It is clear that the massive defensive undertaking did take its toll on the Chinese peasants and a number of bones have been found buried inside the wall.

Once we reached the end of this section of the Wall, we decided to turn back and go the other direction. Here, most people take a bus to the top and walk down due to the steepness, but we decided to try on our own. After an impossibly strenuous climb and the laughs of Chinese going down with the help of gravity, we finally made it up the mountain on this side of the wall.

Finally, it was time for our driver to pick us up and take us back into town. The drive down the narrow country road that winds it way through the surrounding foothills was without a doubt the scariest part of the weekend. Along the way, cars are constantly leap-frogging one another while trying to avoid the on-coming traffic in the other lane. Luckily, we made it back in one piece (I have seen surprisingly few accidents for all the terrible driving I have witnessed) and were able to get train tickets back to Tianjin.

Being a smaller town, there is only one train per day that departs from Ji for Tianjin. The train ticket only costs $1, but unfortunately this was a regular passenger train and had no air-conditioning. As we pulled away from the station and settled into our seats (benches really) it almost seemed like a trip back in time. We were boarding a train that may have been in service during the early 20th century, except that it probably would have had a fresher paint job at that time. Despite the fact that the seats seemed to be mostly full, we made 10 stops along the way to pick up more passengers from the countryside who flooded into the aisles. Two and a half long hours later, we were back in Tianjin.

Luckily, when we make the 25-hour train ride to Chengdu later this week, we'll be on a modern train equipped with A/C and nice sleeping cars. Overall though, we had a fun weekend and felt that it would be a good warm-up for our upcoming traveling. We were able to successfully get food, shelter and from place A to B; so we should be fine! I think that Dr. Lan was also very excited that we stayed an extra night as it was a bit more adventurous than most of the other students, many of whom were just returning to Beijing to go shopping. We enjoyed the chance to be out on our own and are looking forward to getting to see more of China in the upcoming weeks!