Category Archives: China

(China – February 2014) Despite the enormous size of the Big China blog-post, there is more. After all, our China experience was far greater than the sum of all tourist attractions seen. Seemingly trivial events that occur between the sights will often reveal the most fascinating aspects of a country.

Celebrity Sightings in China! (Us)

As Jessica and I made our way through China, we got many a curious stare. Sometimes the looks went further and we were asked to pose in a photo. By “we” I mostly mean, me. (I guess Jessica doesn’t look quite as strange and different as me.) We were told in advance this would happen and sure enough it did. I generally didn’t mind, though once Jessica and I were in the middle of debating whether or not we wanted to do a particular tour and people zoomed in with big smiles and cameras waving. Sorry, it’s not always going to be the right time ‘to sign autographs.’ I hope they didn’t think we were rude Americans.

Probably about 10 separate times did I pose for pictures with Chinese people. Jessica captured some of that action.

A thorough discussion resulted from all of this celebrity treatment. Why? Why are they eager to take our picture? The first of our two leading speculative answers to this question is that there is so much all-look-same within their own culture, they are excited to see people so different from themselves. Additionally, they seem to view us as special or privileged people…kind of like celebrities. The second explanation we came up with is that taking photos together is a form of connecting to people that are obviously from another part of the world. Posing for pictures is both universal and personal….and it requires only non-verbal communication. It’s a symbolic form of outreach; a harmless gesture that connects people together.

Anyone else have an idea?

Jessica wasn’t interested in posing with random Chinese people, but she did receive an awesome amount of attention from a cute little girl we met on a tram car during our journey from Guilin to Yangshuo. The little girl was sitting with her mom and dad in the three-across seat in front of Jessica and me. She turned her whole body around and faced Jessica, smiling and displaying excess cuteness all the while. Jessica responded with smiles of her own and it was game on. First we took pictures. A moment later the little girl reached for Jessica’s hands and pulled them up to cup her own face. I’m not sure what this meant since all attempts at verbal communication beyond Hello were failing.

After exiting the tram, the little girl insisted on holding Jessica’s hand as they walked down the street towards where our bus was parked. Jessica truly had little choice in the matter as the girl latched onto her entire forearm with both arms, as if squeezing a teddy bear. The little girl’s mom was mostly staying out of it, but eventually admonished her vibrant daughter to let go. In sparse English, the mom explained, “She very friendly.”

Friendly indeed, at least where Jessica was concerned. It was really a special little bonding moment that defies easy explanation.

Beijing and China’s Ugly Side

Of the five cities we went to in mainland China, by far the least appealing was Beijing. I have no doubt there are many dozen remarkable places to visit within Beijing, but until they clean up their environment, we won’t be seeing them. The air pollution is so bad that being there just three days seemed like almost too much. Such a shame. And it is not just the air that’s dirty, it’s the cars, streets, sidewalks, buildings, bushes, trees….you name it, it’s dirty.

Jessica and I had a lengthy discussion about the pollution situation and came away with different predictions about if and when it would get better. I say in 10 or 15 years there will be significant improvements. Jessica thinks it is so bad now that even 15 years is not enough time for a turnaround. Only time will deliver the answer.

In the past six months, the Chinese government has released several official statements regarding its intention to clean up the air and environment. The wording of some of these statements has been remarkably direct and forceful. Of course, only if actions follow these edicts will things start to change.

During our visit to China we have witnessed so many grand accomplishments of the Chinese people. In my mind, there is little reason not to believe that if China aims to be cleaner, it will.

A day in Beijing. There are no clouds obscuring the sun. That’s all smog.

Spit and Litter

Prior to coming to China, we heard about all of the PDS- public displays of spitting. Unfortunately, it’s disgustingly true. People of all ages and both genders will hawk up a chunk of spit like it’s no big deal at all. The sidewalk is the chief recipient of so much mocos, but we saw people drop spit indoors and even inside the subway cars. Yes, it’s pretty gross.

Chinese spitters aren’t quiet or discreet, either. Even when you were not seeing someone in the act of spitting, you were still hearing it. Often we would hear a close succession of spitting sounds coming at us from several directions. It was almost comical at times…but still super gross.

Our Chinese guide for the tour of the Terracotta Warriors told us she used to not think anything of all the spitting. However, after returning from her first trip outside of China, she’s changed her mind. There’s one convert.

Littering was even more prevalent than spitting. People would eat something from a wrapper and just let the trash drop wherever they stood or sat. After exiting the Forbidden City we walked past a vendor selling corn-on-the-cob from a cart. Five additional minutes walking down the sidewalk and we started seeing mostly eaten ears of corn thrown into the iced-over pond next to the walking path. It was only one or two cobs at first, but then we saw discarded cobs by the dozen, all pitched aside onto the frozen pond… that otherwise would have been quite picturesque. C’mon, people!

Chinese Food is Better in America

This next revelation pains me slightly. Our experiences eating Chinese food in China were not nearly as great as we were expecting. Admittedly we were not super adventuresome with our menu selections, but we ate plenty of rice and noodles along with chicken, beef and veggies. The problem was simply that the seasonings we found were not particularly interesting or delicious. They were alright, but less than we expected.

Another problem I had with the Chinese menus was that so many dishes featured crazy and obscure animal parts. Glazed Chicken Feet in Sauce, or Fish Lung Soup, etc. From my American perspective, cooks were leaving the bounds of reason to come up with the most outrageous and shocking meals imaginable.

My comments about the food are general. We did eat a few meals that were quite delicious.

Pizza Huts in China are not what you’d expect. We ate there once looking for something familiar. What we found wasn’t familiar at all….it was far better!

In a previous post, I made this big thing about the different table napkins we are finding throughout the world. Well get this, in China we mostly found they give you NO napkins. That seems either negligent or insane to me. Apparently it is customary for people to provide their own napkins wherever they go. Lame!

Slow or No Internet

Updating our travel blog while in China was not happening. Internet connections were always fax machine slow. Plus, the travel pace we kept (5 cities in 14 days) allowed precious little time to work on it.

Did you know Facebook and YouTube are both banned in China? We accessed them on occasion, but only because we paid some extra greenbacks to get a US proxy server.

What is not banned are a few choice US TV Shows. Big Bang Theory is very popular in China, (and everywhere else we’ve traveled). The big surprise was the popularity of another American show, 2 Broke Girls. Who knew?!

Squat Toilets

So far our world travels have introduced us to many different types of toilets. Mostly it is the flush mechanisms that vary- lever on side, lever on the front, button on top, multiple buttons on top, pull-plungers, foot flushers, etc. What we had not seen prior to China were so many squat toilets. A squat toiliet has no seat on it, only a porcelain or metal base on the floor, with a hole at its center over which one hovers in a squatting position to do their business.

At first the squat toilets struck me as uncivilized and “backwards” but that impression soon evaporated. In many Asian countries (including China), squatting on one’s haunches seems to be a perfectly comfortable position. Wherever people are gathered, you are sure to see a few of them folded down like they’ve taken a seat on their own heels. I’ve tried to replicate this style of chair-less sitting with highly uncomfortable and short-lived results. Although, if I had grown up squatting this way since childhood, I’m sure doing so would feel as comfy as the latest Herman Miller chair.

Furthermore, I’ll bet you squat toilets have ruled China for thousands of years. Western “throne” toilets are probably a relatively new innovation in China. I assume many Chinese detest the type of toilet you and I think of as normal. “You want me to sit on what?!” To bring home this point, we saw signs posted in bathrooms warning people against squatting on the toilet seat.

While in China, Jessica and I both encountered one type of public restroom that was truly awful by our standards. (Naturally, you need to hear about it, right?) Upon entering, the bathroom looked almost normal- stalls with doors all lined up on one side of the room. Enter a stall, however, and the truth comes at you. Instead of finding a regular toilet, or even a squat toilet, inside the stall, this restroom had a squat trough; an open trough that ran from stall #1 to stall #8, (or however many stalls there were). A continuous trickle of water flowed through the trough, carrying everyone’s business (and the stench that goes with) from the high side to the low side. Choose your stall carefully, my friend.

China Was Our Half-Way Point

Half our trip is gone and half still lies ahead. It is a moment to reflect.

Even while in the midst of doing it, traveling the world for a year often does not seem real to us. It sounds weird, but…being us is scarily like being other people, people we’ve only heard about. Put better, the way (we think) you view us is very much like the way we view ourselves….as that incredibly fortunate and fun couple that’s traveling the world for a year. The fact that we happen to be the ones experiencing all this wonder is a challenging concept for us to grasp. We talk about it a lot, by the way. I guess it is our way of pinching ourselves to make sure it’s real.

Before we began this trip, Jessica posed the following question to me, “Ideally speaking, what would you most like to get out of this trip?” I said I’d like to come back from it fundamentally different in some way. Now, at the half-way point, am I experiencing some sort of fundamental shift in my being? Good question! My answer: I have no earthly idea. Check back with me in a couple of years.

Flashes of sadness are inescapable when we think about our trip-of-a-thousand-lifetimes coming to an end. Therefore, we mostly don’t think about it. Passing the half-way point, however, has brought those thoughts closer to the surface. But then we realize all there is to look forward to in the next six months, especially Greece, Italy and the rest of Western Europe. Mallorie and Brandon, and nieces, Leanne & Mickaela, will meet up with us soon. I’ll play Ultimate on the beach at a big tournament in Italy. We’ll see Boris again, this time in Switzerland. Another niece, Glorie, will travel with us in London and Paris. Flashes of sadness, we’ll take, since there is so much goodness yet to come.

Sending you away with a fun pic from Hangzhou.

(China – 15 February, 2014) The expression, “digging a hole to China,” is a line every kid in America has heard before. Adults know the truth, but it’s a fun line to say to a child digging in a sandbox or similar. Jessica and I can both remember how this idea didn’t seem absurd to us at the time. “Wow! Is that true?” It certainly plays on a child’s imagination and lets them know… China is a place far, far away from home.

That sense of being very far from home lurked in our subconscious as we began our two weeks in China. As you will see it is a strange land indeed and not just very far from home geographically, but in almost every other respect.

Half-Price Books to the Rescue

When planning for China we only knew of two things we wanted to see/do: We wanted to see the Terracotta Warriors and walk on the Great Wall. Beyond that we were shrugging our shoulders and in clear need of direction. China is bigger than the US; how does one decide where to go and what to do during a two-week visit? Thank goodness I’d bought a China travel book while we were still in Austin. Overall, the book turned out to be pretty lame because it lacked many important details when we needed them. What it was good for was providing a specific place-to-place travel plan after departing from Hong Kong: Yangshuo – Hangzhou – Shanghai – Xi’an – Beijing.

Most Americans have heard of Beijing and Shanghai, the two largest cities in China, but the names of the other cities we visited will be meaningless and puzzling to pronounce. That’s okay. Here’s a lightning-round primer just the same:

– Yangshuo is located in the southwest quadrant of China and boasts some of the most unusual terrain found anywhere on the planet.

– Hangzhou is a remarkably pretty city located closer to China’s eastern seaboard, not very far south of Shanghai, in the grand scheme of things. The centerpiece of Hangzhuo is a beautiful lake called Xi Nu (or West Lake). By all accounts the lake is the city’s heart and soul and they do a great job of treating it as such.

– Shanghai is not much more than a big city, but it’s uber-modern and so easy to like. Located on the east coast, Shanghai lays claim to having the busiest shipping port in the world. It also has great landmarks, museums, and, of course, shopping.

– Xi’an is one of China’s ancient capital cities and hugely important historically. Today it is most famous for being home to the Terracotta Warriors. To get to Xi’an we traveled back towards the west and a little northward about 14 hours by train.

– Beijing is China’s largest city (and its capital). While there is much to see and do in Beijing, our primary purpose for going was to see The Great Wall of China. Like Shanghai, Beijing is on the east coast and much further to the north.

If you followed all of the west-east-west-east directional zig-zagging, you’ll realize our route roughly drew an S-shape over China.

Strange Place, Yangshuo

Strange and exotic may be the two best words to describe the landscape around Yangshuo. As we traveled around the area by boat and bus, I pondered how I would describe the uniquely shaped karst peaks in the blog. After much thought, I’m still not sure how to describe it. This is one place where a picture is truly worth a thousand words.

Getting to Yangshuo was a crazy, multi-step affair. We flew into Guilin (Gway-leen) from Hong Kong where we spent our inaugural night on the mainland. First impressions were spooky. The Guilin airport was on the outskirts of the city (just as many airports are with respect to the city they serve). When riding in the cab to the hostel we were treated to nice wide streets that were shockingly barren. We wondered, “Where are all the people?” Most of the buildings we drove past were all or half-finished, but in either case, uninhabited. Were we in the Twilight Zone?

By the time we entered the heart of Guilin, we found people and traffic and street vendors and more of what you’d expect from China.

Yangshuo Power Rafting

In the morning we took a shuttle bus from our hostel to the banks of the Li River where four-person motorized bamboo rafts awaited. Our guide for the trip to Yangshuo was Shau Nu. Thankfully for us he went by the super-easy nickname, “KFC.” A fast talker in both English and Chinese, it was fun to see KFC in action. He had folks laughing in two languages.

Oh noooo! Jessica accidentally left her iPhone on the bus!! She realized it right about the moment I snapped the pic below.

Jessica courageously put thoughts of losing her phone to the side and tried to enjoy the trip, but to claim it wasn’t a distraction would be a big fib. The feeling you get from losing something so vital can put a big ol’ knot in the gut, for sure.

Phone distractions aside, those bamboo boats sure created a racket. And there were hundreds of other tourists doing the same thing. Such an extraordinary landscape…turned into a go-kart track. It was an adventure, to be sure, but not very relaxing.

The bamboo boats end their trip at a spot made famous because its view appears on the 20 Yuan bill.

After plying the river, we were reunited with our bus and Jessica was able to find her phone. What a HUGE relief that was. We then rode the rest of the way into Yangshuo, where the bus dropped us off nowhere near our hotel. Um, okay. I guess we’ll ask somebody. And that’s when we learned that not too many people speak English in Yangshuo. Pointing and nodding eventually got us to where we needed to be.

Superbowl in China

When KFC had described Yangshuo, several times he said it was “very small.” I wonder if maybe very small doesn’t translate directly from Chinese into English. Yangshuo was no small town in our eyes… and plenty crowded to boot. Not so small that we couldn’t find a place showing the Super Bowl, neither. Yay!

An Australian ex-pat that owned a little restaurant showed the game through an Internet feed at 7:30 AM local time. Jessica and I were there. The Australian couldn’t care less about football, but he understood that it was a big deal to Americans and was happy to open his doors and serve us breakfast in front of a rigged-up screen. There were about 12 of us watching. All of the color commentary was in Chinese and the game was a lop-sided bust, but we were still quite happy to have been a part of it, especially while so far away.

In every one of our Yangshuo photos (and virtually ALL of our scenery photos in China), you will notice what looks like fog or morning mist. Unfortunately, it is neither. It is polluted air. Everyone that comes to China will inevitably talk about its pollution problem. Now we’ve experienced it first hand…and yes, it’s as bad as they say. There’s no way to overlook it. It’s literally in your face no matter which direction you turn your eyes (and nose). At no point did it ruin our visit to China, but it sure put a thick grey damper on every activity.

A day after our motorized rafting trip, we went on a second bamboo raft, this time we went old school (sans motor); so much more peaceful. I love this pic of all the bamboo rafts lined up and ready for tourists.

Here we are floating on.

The very pretty Dragon Bridge.

Rain in Hangzhou

In general, we’ve had great luck with weather nearly our entire trip. But on occasion….we get snookered by less than ideal conditions. In pretty Hangzhou, it rained a bit. Never enough to keep us from venturing out to see the sites, but I do think it made us miss what might have been. I mean, if this place- West Lake -was great in the rain, how much more awesome would it be on a beautiful day?

One benefit of the rain was that it hid the air pollution really well. Is the sky gray because it’s raining or because the air is polluted? We chose to blame it on the rain.

Hangzhou’s West Lake is big enough so that visitors can enjoy a leisurely cruise across it. But not so large that the eye cannot pick out a towering pagoda on its opposite side. The entire circumference of the lake seems to be park, too. Kudos to Hangzhou for doing it up right.

Jessica and I rode bikes around part of the lake, took a turn in a pedal car, and explored it by foot. All good.

Sure, this photo is a little bit “staged,” but that really is us walking by the Hangzhou lake on a rainy day in February.

Specks of drizzle landed on the camera lens creating a cool “effect.”

The Hangzhou lake boats are finished like fine furniture. Look at this thing!

One more from around the lake…

Shanghai, High on Energy

The train ride to Shanghai from Hangzhou was remarkably short- only 1 1/2 hours on the bullet train. The arrival into Shanghai caught us totally by surprise. One moment we were cruising down the tracks at 300 kph and the next we were alone in the train with the stewards squawking at us in Chinese to get off. (At least I assume that’s what they were saying.)

Shanghai may not be geographically far from Hangzhou, but it is a world away in terms of character. We went from strolling around a peaceful lake in Hangzhou to weaving through a crowded pedestrian-only shopping district in the middle of Shanghai. People were everywhere. Departments stores and malls, everywhere. I swear there were malls packed within malls, like Russian dolls. On the street we were approached by vendors one after another. We’d gotten pretty good and softly shaking our heads and loudly saying, “Thank youuuuu,” yet one of them got through to me. I couldn’t stop myself from buying a pair of wheels that transformed my tennis shoes into wheelies. Anyone know how to turn a video 90 degrees?

Here’s an odd little incident to report. We were being photographed! And I don’t just mean by regular Chinese people, (which did happen a bunch). Twice we were photographed by men dressed in all black and carrying large, formidable-looking cameras at their hip. They weren’t raising their cameras to take pictures like normal people. They were clearly trying to do it on the sly. One of these two “men in black” passed very close to me. Jessica and I were walking down the street and looking at something to our right. I turned back to the front just in time to catch a glimpse of the (not so) secret agent rushing passed me on the left, camera aimed right towards us. Creeper!

Spot Jessica taking over the street.

Each leg of our China travels moved us further northward…into colder and colder climates. Shanghai was the coldest yet. Thank goodness we were prepared for it; three and four layers of clothing became a matter of routine. Our reward- SNOW! Real big fluffy snow, too. No, you don’t understand, we’re from Texas. We don’t see a lot of snow. Snow is something to smile and get excited about, and so we did.

Yuyuan Gardens in Shanghai.

Here’s how to top off a wall.

Shanghai by night.

Xi’an and Emperor Qin’s Underground Army

If you are familiar at all with the Terracotta Warriors, it is probably because you saw something about them on the History Channel or National Geographic. For the rest of you, here’s three sentences that will bring you up to speed. Around the year 200 bc, China had a supremely powerful (and crazy) emperor named Qin (pronounced quickly and sounding like, Chin). Fueled by self-importance, Emperor Qin ordered that his burial site be protected by a complete garrison of 8,000 full-size and life-like warriors. This army, complete with commanding officers, archers, infantrymen and even horses, was made piece by detailed piece out of terracotta clay, fitted with weapons, and then buried in covered pits, deep underground.

A tiny bit of background will help explain how Qin came up with his “brilliant” idea. In times further back than Qin’s, leaders were routinely buried with oodles of idols and trinkets, Qin simply took it to the next level. Going back a few more generations and archeologists and historians have discovered something much more chilling. In ancient times it was customary for an Emperor’s entire staff (generals, advisors, servants and, of course, his concubines) to be killed and buried along with their deceased leader. This practice was abandoned during times of war for practical reasons…because they couldn’t spare the manpower.

I had always heard that the warriors were “buried,” but couldn’t figure out what that meant. Were they put in the ground and covered with dirt? While this is mostly how they ended up, at the time they were buried they were placed standing (or kneeling in the case of the archers) in long and deep dugout pits. The pits were then topped with timbers that gave the warriors a roof over their heads. Above the timbers several layers of tightly woven mats were placed to keep out the dirt that was shoved back over the top of them….until the whole landscape was flat earth again. (Just like it never happened.)

As the centuries passed, earthquakes shook the warriors off their feet, breaking them like dropped clay pots. Time rotted away the wooden timbers that formed their protective roof, crushing them further and causing them to be truly buried. Only one warrior escaped the 2000 years unbroken. He is the magic archer.

All the rest that you’ve seen in photos have been found in pieces and painstakingly reassembled by archeologists.

In Person, Intense

Seeing the Terracotta Warriors with one’s own eyes is mentally/emotionally intense. I guess the enormous scale of the undertaking cannot be fully appreciated until you’ve stood on the edge of those deep pits and peered at the warrior’s faces. Contemplating what it must have been like for the individual laborers and artisans as they toiled away their lives for a lunatic Emperor is a natural place for the mind to venture.

Each warrior’s face is unique; most probably modeled after real people that lived at that time, though I’ve read that point is debated by the experts. One theory says every face was done in the likeness of the artist that created it. The last square shows one of the pits where archeologists continue to do their work…at night…after all the tourists are gone.

Some warriors are encased in glass for up-close viewing. Hundreds of the broken warriors remain down in the pits, waiting for their turn to stand again. All of the warriors were painted prior to being buried. Only traces of paint remain on a few of the warriors today.

Emperor Qin’s Army of the Terracotta Warriors was never supposed to be discovered. Nothing has been found in the written record (so far, at least) to indicate its existence. Supposedly, even the craftsmen that made the warriors were themselves killed to keep the secret safe for all time. And secret it was until 1974 when a local farmer and some helpers discovered the first pit while digging a water well. That farmer’s name is Yang Xinman, Since his discovery he has become a local celebrity of sorts. He even works part-time at one of the museum shops. And we shook his hand!

Xi’an Extracurricular Activities

It wasn’t all warriors all the time in Xi’an. Two other activities deserve mention. Xi’an’s city center is surrounded by its own ‘great wall,’ an imposing defensive barrier running 12 miles in a square that is nearly as impressive as the Great Wall itself. We saw every inch of it, too, on a rented tandem bike. Notice the smokestack spewing out pollution in the background.

Every night at 8:30, Xi’an puts on a major dancing fountain show at the base of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda.

Always clear what year it is.

Beijing’s Forbidden City

Chinese history is truly fascinating. And few places will give visitors to China such a visceral introduction to it like the Forbidden City. From our hotel it only took 25 minutes of brisk walking to reach it. It did require first entering the famous Tianamen Square, site of intense anti-government protests in 1984…that were soundly and bloodily crushed by the authorities while much of the world looked on. Security in and around the square was serious and plentiful. We even had to pass through a metal detector and have our backpack screened just to stroll through the square and look around. There’s not really that much to see; a couple of large monuments “to the laborers” of China and some large flower beds, but otherwise, it’s just a large open concrete space. Good for displays of military might, to be sure. A giant picture of Chairman Mao, leader of the communist revolution, hangs on the outside wall of the Forbidden City and overlooks the square. This also marks the place where he is buried.

At the northern edge of Tianamen Square lies the Imperial City (or Beijing’s “inner” city). It is surrounded by a thick, high protective wall. Within the Imperial City is an even smaller sub-section (still huge, by the way) called the Forbidden City. It too is surrounded by its own thick wall…plus a moat. (The Chinese sure were big on building walls!) The Forbidden City was so named because “commoners” were not allowed inside; the Emperor and his aristocracy only, please.

In walking around China, Jessica noticed how often the word forbidden was used for just about everything that was off limits. Signs might say, “Walking on Grass is Forbidden,” for example. It is probably a matter of translation, but we found their use of the word forbidden reached a comical extreme.

Great Tour Guide Has Bad Breath

Our exploration of the Forbidden City was greatly enhanced by Michael, the certified guide we enlisted to show us around. His English was solid, his knowledge of history superb, but his breath stunk like a sewer. It was very distracting. Offering him a mint occurred to me but couldn’t quite muster up the courage. What if I offered and he said, no thank you? Awkward.

The greatest thing about having a guide is being able to ask questions. Listening to an audio guide can be good and informational signs are better than nothing, but neither can compete with a knowledgable guide (bad breath or not) at making a tourist site come alive.

The chain of emperors recedes into history for thousands of years. We viewed the palace buildings where they held council, the thrones where they delivered decrees, both devastating and benign, and the living quarters where they changed their underwear. We even learned of one Emperor who was almost certainly gay and another that (according to the official royal documentarian) once “got busy” with 87 concubines in one night. That emperor died at 32, by the way.

It was a game of thrones for these emperors, as different thrones- centered in different buildings -were utilized depending on the occasion. Above each throne are Chinese symbols that convey philosophies intended to guide the emperors in their rule. One of them says (something like), “Do little to achieve much,” a reminder for the emperor to rule with restraint.

The Great Wall(s) of China

The great advantage of visiting a place- like the Great Wall -in person is that you not only get wowed by the sheer spectacle of its magnificence, you are more inclined to learn new things about it. First off, we that learned a widely believed ‘fact’ about the Great Wall is actually not true at all: the Great Wall cannot be seen from space with the naked eye. Myth-busted! We learned the Great Wall of China that everybody knows and loves is only one of several walls built by the Chinese over the past 3,000 years. The first walls were built in the 8th and 7th centuries bc out of clay and dirt. Today those earliest walls have deteriorated to the point where many sections are visible only to the trained eye of archeologists. Some walls were built in one century and then disassembled and rebuilt elsewhere in subsequent centuries. It’s a fascinating history and so much more disjointed than I’d previously understood.

Anyone visiting today’s nearly 5,000 mile long Great Wall has many wall ‘locations’ to choose from. Badaling is the name of the site where most tourists go; it’s nearest to Beijing and refurbished to a stunning state, perhaps looking better now than it ever did in the past. The knock on the Badaling section is that it is too crowded and too touristy. Wanting a more peaceful experience, Jessica and I went to a section called Mutianyu– located about 70 km (43 miles) northeast of Beijing. This stretch of the wall was originally built in the 6th century, and then rebuilt about a thousand years later (during the Ming Dynasty). Ming’s crews rebuilt it to a very high standard and Mutainyu remains the best-preserved expanse of the Great Wall today.

Walking the wall is a calf-killer. Because the wall follows the contour of the rolling hills, there are steep ups and downs. Photos so often fail to convey elevation and depth so I’ll just tell you….the pic below finds Jessica making her final assault on an extremely steep set of steps.

We enjoyed being on the wall in relative seclusion.

The toboggan ride down from the Great Wall was conceptually incongruent, but oh so much fun.

This was an enormous post (because China is an enormous country). If you seriously read through it all, my hat is coming off for you.

When Jessica and I initially presented (to each other) the list of countries we would most like to visit while traveling around the world, neither of us included China. It was too far, too foreign, and too scary. However, in the end we concluded that traveling the world for a year and NOT going to China would be tantamount to negligence. And so we took the plunge.

Our visit to five points on the China map (counting Guilin and Yangshuo as one) gave us a solid overview of China. We are so glad for the experience, too. In some small way, being there was fulfilling the childhood fantasy of what it would be like to dig through the Earth and catch a glimpse of Chinese life.