(View of the village from one of the tower's on the wall.)
(Look at how steep it is! It looks as though it's a straight drop, but looks can be deceiving!)
(A part of the wall photographed from the collapsed tower in the top of the lower photo.)
(On the wall!)
(A frozen part of the nearby river that runs along the village below the Wall.) 
(The gate in the wall that the village of 撞道口[joo-ahng dao koh] is famous for.)
（This is a little street in the practically empty village near the Great Wall, this sign says "May Mao Live for 10,000 Years!" It is probably still left over from the Cultural Revolution days.)This part of our travels through Beijing was incredible! We couldn't believe that we had actually CLIMBED the Great Wall! Because the part of the wall we went to was less traveled (no one was on the wall but us!) there weren't any stairs leading up to it. Diego, Taotao, Carina, and I walked through the tiny cluster of houses (past big scary barking dogs, thankfully they were chained up!) then hiked up a mountain pass to the gate in the wall (pictured above). The gate in the wall is what this little village is famous for apparently.
The feeling that I experienced when I mounted the wall was breathtaking. I was a part of a huge feat that stretches across the better part of China. Also the sky was clear and not so cold. Taotao took many pictures of us with his fancy camera. We left him where we mounted the wall (his legs are bad). In total we explored two little towers of the wall. One tower had completely collapsed! Most of the time we didn't speak, just admired the wall and the view from it.
An hour or two passed....we hiked down the pass, got into the car and fell asleep. The day was quite exhausting!
3 comments:
In the second photo I thought that the wall was just a row of bricks in the ground until I realized that the green isn't moss, it's a tree. A wall that big really throws off one's perspective and sense of proportion. I guess that village with its stair to the wall is analogous to those towns here that are only famous for "the biggest paper-mache chicken" and the like; just their 'paper-mache chicken' is more historically important and interesting (not to mention it can be seen from space).
CAPine
yep no stairs! so we actually climbed it! :D that was so cool
like your analogy
Arthur, the wall pics are great, we went to Badaling and the view was nothing like what you saw, how far and what direction is this part of the wall from BJ?
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