The Great Wall

October 05, 2018

This has to be one of the coolest things I have ever done. This was a trip with about 10 people who had done a lot of traveling in their lifetime. Most of the hikers were teachers at Beijing World Youth Academy, but many of them worked at other campuses, so I didn't know them.

If The Great Wall wasn't interesting enough, it was so interesting to talk to so many people from all over the world. There was a couple who had backpacked all over Europe, a man who had been a deep sea fisherman, a college student from Germany, a divorced Dad from Ireland, a girl from Cuba, a girl from Panama, a gay guy from NY who has now lived in Beijing for 8 years, and a girl from California who has also lived in China for a long time.

We had 2 guides. One was from the Philippines and one was from China. Carly became the life of the party telling people about all of the 14ers that she had climbed and all of the crazy places we had camped. I also had quite a few stories to tell about Guatemala and Australia.

I have quickly figured out that Carly tells people everything. I cannot get embarrassed anymore. She had told a teacher, "My Mom keeps getting diarrhea every morning."

At one point in the trip, one of the other campers came up and told me, "We have gotten the scoop on your family. Carly said you are the adventurous Mom. Camilla loves fashion. Connor is mean. Your husband is gone all of the time." I didn't even know what to say.

I talked to quite a few of the other teachers about why they decided to work in China. We all had the same core reason. The quality of the education and the pay is just better here. One guy from Australia even said to me, "Is education in the US as bad as what they say on the news?"

After our shuttle picked us up, it was about a 2 hour drive up to a little village near the Great Wall. It was located in the Heibei province. We were brought into the home of a family that cooked us a nice meal. There was rice, vegetables, fried mushrooms, dumplings, and spinach. Carly even liked the meal, despite dropping her chopsticks 3 times.

Then we walked around the village for a while and saw barrels of corn that apparently get used for energy.

It was a very poor little village. It was then about a 20 minute drive to the start of our hike. The hike was pretty rocky and I got scratched by many sticks along the path. I was the only dumb one who decided to wear shorts.

It took us about 3 hours (10 kilometers) to hike to our camping spot. We could have done it a lot faster, but there were many people in our group that were not in good shape.

Carly kept showing off that she could run up and down really fast and we all told her to stop running. She was making us all very nervous. We were among the first people to arrive to the camping spot, so Carly built a fire pit.

She put rocks in a little circle and collected wood. Everyone was super impressed. I had multiple people tell me that I have done a great job raising her.

One of our favorite parts was sitting around the fire telling stories. It got pretty cold up there and we would have all been curled up in our sleeping bags if it wasn't for the fire. Many people died building the Great Wall and a lot of the people started telling ghost stories and playing pranks that there were footsteps outside of our tent.

I woke at 5:45am to see the sunrise and it was worth it. I loved the time to be silent with my thoughts. Being in a big city has made me really crave nature and quiet.

It took us about 2 hours to walk down and we went to a little restaurant in the ming village for breakfast. The breakfast was pretty plain but good. Tofu, eggs, bread, and vegetables.

The section of the wall that we climbed is called the Yangbian Great wall. It was built during the Ming Dynasty. We climbed up on the Mongolian side and climbed down on the Chinese side.

The history of the wall is pretty fascinating. The Mongolian side does not have doors that allow people to pass through and it is the harder side to climb.