the birm*

If you’ve never driven in the Ukraine, Russia, Viet Nam, China or Mexico you probably can’t understand what it’s like. The best description I can give you is mayhem. After your third or fourth near miss head-on crash, you kinda get used to it. Let’s just say that cars travel faster, swerve more, don’t worry about blinkers, blind corners or speed limits and come closer to hitting each other a lot of the time…

Anyway, we got there. It was quite cold (-5?) but the up hill walk quickly warmed us up. we got to the wall, which is kind of surreal. It’s so big and long (due to the smog we could only see a bit of it but I’m told it’s 20 000km long…) and built on mountain ridges with hills and cliffs either side.

We walked up and up past a number of towers until we reached number 12 (which is the last one you can walk to). Matt tells me that before the guards get there you can go past it and it becomes really interesting (not as well maintained and very steep). Matt jokingly asked one of the guards who collected the 200Y fine if you went further. The guards kinds took it seriously and said that they would. So Matt asked (he hasn’t changed!) if it was more of a ticket than a fine…

It was agreed that we’d talk about the price when we got back. We were warned to be careful then let through.

The wall becomes quite skinny at this point and climbs almost vertically (I felt like I was climbing up the staircase Frodo has to climb in Lord of the Rings). It was quite scary at a few places, where you kind of stepped over airy sections or round sheer corners…

We got to tower 15 and stopped there. Tower 16, which was half a km away, is the highest of that area and you can see Beijing from it on a clear day (100+ kms away). it was incredible. You really felt on top of the world and could only imagine how many thousands of people lost their lives building such a structure on such sheer slopes.

After some food, some photos and some reflections (and a friendly chat to one of the guards who’d come up to meet us to see if we were OK and cause he hadn’t been up that far), we started the not-so-fun down-climb.

We got back to the guards, who Matt talked down to 100Y each (about $17) and headed back into the valley. Once off the wall we hopped on a flying fox that looked 1km long and flew down over a lake and into the valley. For a few bucks we got yet another amazing experience and it saved us 30mins of walking downhill! What else can I say but a superb day in an amazing place with a great friend! Thanks Matt!