::A Geek in Korea::

We got up the mountain with no problems thanks to the cable car lift. In windier weather, the lift doesn’t run, so you had a long walk up to the wall, as well as the climb back down. We spent the time taking pictures instead. We got to the top of the mountain only to be told that the lift ticket didn’t include the price of admission into the wall itself. They posted the sign at the top of the mountain….why? Anyway, our tour was all expenses paid, so the guide had taken care of us already.

The view from the Great Wall was incredible. The winter weather, snow, and clouds hinted at the distances involved with everything, yet kept things mysterious at the same time. I took some huge pictures that will probably be my computer wallpaper for as long as I own a computer. The wall was extremely steep at places, with near vertical areas covered in ice in places. One slip would have sent dozens of people tumbling down. The places was crowded with tourists from dozens of different places. Every group was speaking a different language, snapping pictures, and gasping at the view.

We got to the top of the section we were at only to be surrounded by people selling merchandise at inflated prices! Talk about ruining the atmosphere! People hauled their stuff all the way up the mountain to sell things at prices 100 times the usual cost.  If I hauled the stuff up the mountain I’d charge a premium too. We decided against anything when we realized that even the smallest trinket would have cost us the remaining money we had in our pockets.

We turned around, went back down snapping pictures as we went. Picture with my wife. Picture with me. Picture of the landscape. Wash, rinse, repeat as we went down the steps. We even got a few together when we could  get someone to take a picture of us. There were so  many people walking that it was often hard to get a picture with only one person in the shot however.

Every time I thought I got a sense of scale and magnitude of this work, I was blown away to see another part of the wall hiding behind another mountain. The Wall went in the most amazing places. The mountains weren’t exactly friendly to begin with, I can’t imagine the effort it demanded to put a gigantic wall on top of it. Parts of building a wall seemed almost redundant anyway, as the mountain peaks were already pretty hard to climb anyway.

The wind was so cold it was hard to believe that people to stayed on the wall as guards their entire lives. People worked, lived, got married, and died all while living at the place I was standing, and I could barely take my hands out of my gloves to snap a few pictures. Given enough time, enough people, and total power, people can accomplish (or be forced to do) some very impressive things.

This chance to see the Great Wall was why I went to China. Yet when we took the cable car down to the tourist area only after thirty minutes, I was still happy. It’s a memory that will stay with me for the rest of my life. I’ve got pictures to help me recall what it was like, but the feeling of standing on the Wall was in itself an experience I’ll cherish. I’ve been on the largest structure created by mankind in our entire collective known history. Words kind of fail you when you try to put it in perspective, so I’d recommend anyone, and everyone, to visit this wonderful place whenever you can. It might seem like a distant destination, but something you can’t appreciate unless you go there.

I’ve seen the Great Wall of China, and it was truly a great thing.