The coolest part about this trip was that we didn't join in the throng of tourists at the main Great Wall locations open to the public. We found this guy in the hotel we were staying in, and he offered us a deal to have a one-day tour including transportation (him driving a van), meals (home-cooked by village people he knows), and stops at two different points of the Great Wall which are not open to public.
Part One: The Useless Dam (that's what our guide called it)
According to him, some villagers long ago arbitrarily decided to build a dam to store waters from the spring floods, but since they didn't know what they were doing, the dam held no water and has always stood as dry as it is today. We began at the dam and walked a little way out along the Wall, and it was completely free of other tourists so we got some pretty epic pictures.
Lunch break: Village by the Dam
We were served a delicious lunch of home-cooked food in the village after coming down from our first stretch of walking along the Wall. The highlight was a grilled fish freshly caught in a nearby river, seasoned with something amazing. I will never look at fish the same way again. We enjoyed our rest in the intensely air-conditioned guest room they provided, since it was overwhelmingly hot outside with extremely high humidity. Walking for just five or ten minutes resulted in sweating like pigs, yum. The air was so humid it was hard to breathe.
In this village, many of the old houses were actually built from bricks that villagers generations ago stole from the base of the wall that was conveniently nearby. The government is now in the process of offering new bricks to families to keep them from stealing more. The locals take advantage of this by making sure their application for new bricks coincides with the marriage of a son or daughter so that a house for the new couple can be built with the free materials. An old house indicates lack of children/grandchildren of marrying age, and a new one indicates a recent wedding.
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| The main section of the useless dam. |
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| epic. |
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| nice hats; a gift from our guide |
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| some ridiculously steep stairs |
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| so. hot. ;D |
We then drove the van to another section of the Wall even more secluded than the last. The way up to the Wall was a path through an orchard growing various things including chestnuts, corn, and peach/nectarine type things. The sounds of insects was pretty loud but soothing at the same time, and we appreciated the shade under the trees even though it didn't really help with the heat. We had a local guide for this part of the tour, a woman who proclaimed herself a Guardian of the Wall and a descendant of the workers who built it ages ago. She stopped at a place where we could fill out bottles with cold, clean water from a mountain stream. The water was refreshing and a little bit sweet, and also great to just dump over our heads (at this point everything was soaked with sweat and my hair looked like I had just gotten out of the shower anyway).
We approached the base of the Great Wall and saw that this section had never been maintained by the government (since it's technically closed to public and only those villagers know the way up), so there was no way to actually walk on the Wall as we had done before. The Wall itself was heavily overgrown with trees and shrubs already, and we followed our guide on a tiny footpath along the outside of it going up the hill. It was tough going as the plants growing along the barely-existent path were often prickly, and the ground was either sandy or covered with sharp gravel. I was wearing plastic flip-flops....for some reason...>_<
The climb was worth the scrapes and sweating though, since we got this amazing view that looked like something from a movie or a travel guidebook. This is something you definitely can't see just any old day.
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| view from the trail |
