Monday, August 25, 2008

What? No Escalator?!

After we left the Ming Tombs, our little group headed for that most famous symbol of the Orient: the Great Wall of China. I asked Samantha, our guide, how often she came to the Wall. "Two or three times a week," she replied. "And you climb it every time?" I asked. "No!" she responded with a short laugh. "I will be so tired!" I laughed too, little realizing that the joke was soon to be on me.

Like many of the great engineering feats of ancient China, the Wall was built over a long time; in fact, there have been several walls constructed at different periods in Chinese history. The most popular existing wall (the one you generally see in pictures) was built by the Mings, starting in the mid-15th century. Whether you're a history buff or not, though, the Great Wall is impressive -- extremely impressive. As is so often the case, pictures do not adequately convey the sense of size and weight that you feel when you stand at the base of the Wall, or the awe that washes over you when you realize that the little line running over the hills on the horizon is still the Great Wall.

(I pause to insert a myth-busting parenthesis here: claims that the Wall is visible from the moon are true only if you have had your eyes surgically enhanced with telescopes. It would be comparable to seeing a human hair from two miles away. It is possible to see the Wall from low Earth orbit. Barely. On a crystal-clear day. If you know exactly where to look.)

We went to the Badaling section of the wall. The gates there protected the Imperial capitol, Beijing, from invasion through a strategic mountain pass, and trust me, it would take some serious invading to get through that twenty-five foot high wall. If I'd been a barbarian, I would have just turned right back around and gone home. In fact, the thought crossed my mind as I gazed up -- and up and up -- at the stairs leading from the lowest gate to the first guard tower. Great Wall of China my foot. They should call it the Great Ladder of China. It seems incredible to me that armies, no matter what their condition, could have ever marched across the Wall. It's not that it's too narrow; on the contrary, it's about fifteen feet wide in most places. The problem is that it's ridiculously steep and completely uneven. The average height of a step is probably about double or triple that of a normal staircase like you might have in your home, but each stair is different. One will be six inches high, the next one two feet high, the next eighteen inches, and so on. The widths of the steps varies in a similar manner. Fortunately, the Chinese (not the Mings, but our present administration) have helpfully bolted a handrail to the Wall. This makes thing much easier, but is not always as useful as it may seem, since the steepness of the stairs means that the handrail is sometimes at knee height or lower for a tall man. And yes, I'm a tall man.

Don't get me wrong. The Wall is absolutely worth doing. But for a person with acrophobia, it's quite a feat to get down. Getting up is simply a matter of having enough leg power -- not a problem. Getting down is all about willpower.

As you may have guessed from the fact that I'm writing this post, however, I did make it down eventually. I rewarded myself with a bottle of water, which was available for quadruple the normal price, along with Great Wall t-shirts, Great Wall Commemorative Photos, Great Wall plushies, Great Wall keychains, and the ever-popular red star caps, which seems to show up nearly anywhere there are tourist stands.

Samantha popped up eventually, smiling and looking fresh. "Where were you?" I asked, wondering if there was some kind of lounge where tour guides chatted and sipped iced drinks while their clients dragged themselves, gasping and wheezing, up the worn flagstones of the Wall. "Over there," she replied, waving in the direction of a nondescript hillside. Considering that she'd been gone for three hours, I suspect that my original guess was correct. They probably have closed-circuit TVs in the lounge so that they can keep track of their tourists and take bets on which ones will plummet to their doom or be run over by those infuriating adventurer types who disdain the handrail and always seem to be descending at a run, leaping over three steps at a time like mountain goats and talking and laughing with their friends in some European language while they're doing it.

Not that I'm bitter or anything.

Dave

1 comment:

Carrie said...

I hope you recover soon from your adventure and thanks for sharing. I had a good laugh at your expense. Actually, I laughed most about the surgically enhanced eyes.

:o)