The Great Wall of China like never before !. part I

On this occasion I want to write to all of you about the exciting experience I had when visiting for the first time (in the following post I will narrate part of the experience of my other visits) the extraordinary architectural wonder that is the Great Wall of China. This experience is unique, full of a thousand-year-old energy that is rarely experienced in our daily life.

Since I was very small when I saw photographs, documentaries and reports about this wonderful work, I always had the desire to visit it and walk its long paths and watchtowers, to climb its endless slopes and stairs to reach its highest point, and although images and videos I saw maybe thousands of times for so many years does not describe in the least the feeling of standing in front of this extraordinary work full of history, myths and legends.

I have had the happiness, the fortune and the pleasure (all at the same time) of being in three opportunities in the Great Wall, each of them in different sections or zones of this immense wall and in different seasons of the year, and in each one of these it has been a discovery, a surprise and a pleasure to return to cover their spaces. The excitement and energy that is felt even before arriving, when you begin to see far away in the mountains the watchtowers and the serpentine walls that vanish between the edges of the steep cliffs has always been with the same intensity or maybe more, I think that if he were to visit her 100 times more, it would be just as pleasant and exciting as the first visit.

For the visit to the wall our guide came to the hotel for us, right after breakfast. She decided to take us to the Mutianyu section, a less touristy spot than Badaling and the truth was that it was an excellent decision since it is one of the longest and best preserved routes of the wall. Mutianyu is about 73 km away from Beijing and in a private vehicle the trip takes about 1 hour and 45 minutes. This section of the wall is about 1,400 years old since its construction and was rebuilt some 700 years ago, in 1986 it was completely restored, it is more than 5 kilometers long with 23 of its watch towers.

In this route of Mutianyu you have the option to climb by steps that will take you to the wall, it is about 4,000 and it takes about 1 hour to climb up to the wall. (It's not a good option if you want to make medium or long trips up the wall and continue up the entire route, unless you are one of those Red Bull ultra-fighter competitors) There is also the option to Climb the chairlifts and go down the slide , you get on an open cable car like the ski resorts and you can get off in the same way or by the slide with the same ticket. On the slide, you can go down on a trolley with a lever to slow down by a slide that takes you from the wall to the bottom of the chair lift station, and the third option is to take the cable car from the closed cabin to go up and get off the wall, the latter was the option that we decided to take to make the journey, the journey takes about 12 minutes and although I would have liked to go down the slide, it was very far from where we left the cable car (the closed cabin cable car arrives at the watchtower 14 while the chairlift and the slide are in tower 6); Next time I'll go down the slide.

The emotion is simply indescribable, it is only possible to feel and appreciate all those sensations being in place. I'm there and I think it's a lie that a work built by man can reach those dimensions, in addition to how difficult it must have been to build in a geography as rugged and complex as it is, full of very steep stone mountains with almost vertical slopes of 80 ° of inclination in some sections that make your trip is an adventure full of much adrenaline for which you must go with comfortable clothes and shoes, have some physical preparation and plenty of water to drink if you want to visit these steep stretches and get until its summit.

The guide and translator (excellent, by the way) who accompanied us, told us that the Great Wall officially had until 2008 an extension of more 8,850 km, which makes it have the record of the most extensive work done by man, However, recently the results of studies that began in 2007 by the National Authority of Cultural Heritage with the help of advanced technologies, which discovered new ruins of ancient fortifications that for centuries were hidden in the immense territory of China, were unveiled. . These studies covered some 144,000 sections of different walls, which were built at different periods in the history of China, from the V century BC, when at that time what is today the territory of China was divided into hundreds of fiefs ruled by feudal lords , passing through several dynasties among which stand out the Qin, Han and finally the Ming dynasty of the sixteenth century of the modern age, and which conclude that the Great Wall of China extends for more than 21,900 km in length. This great wall was built, rebuilt and renovated over 2500 years and even today it is still renewed and maintained with great effort, unfortunately the time has been implacable and has left its mark on it, conserving itself until now, near a third part of this majestic work.

Unlike what many believe, this great wall is not a linear or continuous structure but irregular fragments, in fact they are several walls, built throughout the period mentioned above; some branch, cross or go parallel to others being the main wall (where we were) the best known, about 8,850 km long and extending from the Yellow Sea in the east of the country, to the western edge of the desert from Gobi to the west. It is truly impressive, when you hear it said to our guide, the first thing that came to mind was the distance that a couple of days before I had traveled on a plane between Paris and Beijing (Beijin) where there are approximately 8,212 linear km between both capitals, with a flight time of 10 hours and 16 minutes at a speed of 800 km / h, I was silent and gawked for a moment, while I lost my eyes in the vastness of that great mass of bricks and stones and an infinite clear blue sky, which made that wonderful day.

We went through a good stretch of the wall and climbed hundreds of steps up the steep wall until my knees gave no more, ascending to a point where the view was really wonderful and even there. Filled with a great satisfaction for finally having achieved so desired desire; We started the descent while we enjoyed the views that the landscape offered us.

When descending from the cable car station to the exit of the tourist complex we looked for where to eat to recover the calories lost in the walk, in this path there is a kind of boulevard with stalls of traditional Chinese food, and others that offered food from other latitudes, such as pizzas and hamburgers, there are also vendors with any number of memories of the Great Wall, such as franelillas or T-shirts, sculptures, medals, writings and drawings, all of them alluding, of course, to such an imposing structure. In my case the most precious memory that I took from that place was the image in my mind of that spectacular work, plus all the sensations that I experienced during the tour, and to evoke them again, I just had to turn around and look up towards the mountain to see once again the Great Wall lying on the edge of that precipice with the certainty that it will remain there for at least a couple of millennia more.

Thank you for reading my post and continue accompanying me in the next installments of my trips to China and other countries.