The Great Wall

No visit of China can be complete without a trip to the Great Wall. Some courageous people hike it, but this requires multiple public busses, which is more than a bit challenging when you're slow and illiterate. We chickened out and went on a tour bus with an english-speaking guide.

However, the luxury of an organized tour has a steep price: "museum" visits. All organized tours to the great wall make between one and four stops in "museums" that are actually tourist-trap shops, pretending to be of cultural value because they greet every idiot who walks through their doors with a tour showing how whatever crap it is they're selling is made. We got four of them. In the first one, the entrance hall was lined with windows looking into workshops where men toiled as we watched. It looked exactly like a zoo: "Hey, look at all the nice tricks the migrant worker can do!" The next three were much more boring, and the whole thing took hours, but it wasn't a complete loss: now I know how cloisonné vases are made.

We saw the wall itself near Mutianyu, a small municipality that exists only to help tourists enroute to the great wall exchange their cash for sub-par food, crappy souvenirs and cheap thrills. It even offers multiple ways to reach the wall and come back, and after tough negotiations we settled for a chairlift up and a toboggan down, then sat down on a wobbly chair hung by a springy cable and immediately started wondering what safety regulations there was for chairlifts in China.

The scenery from up there is superb, an endless expanse of high rolling hills and valleys so deep that one can't help but wonder why there was ever any need to build a wall here. Of the wall itself, there is little to be said beyond the often-misquoted words of Richard Nixon, first US president to visit communist China: "When one stands here and sees the wall, [...] and realizes it runs for thousands of miles [and] that it was built over 2,000 years ago, I think you would have to conclude that this is a great wall and that it had to be built by a great people." So who cares if it has always been entirely useless?