The Great Workout...I Mean Wall

You can't go to China without visiting the Great Wall--once.

Arriving in Badaling (insert your own Sopranos joke here), we got off the bus and proceeded to run the gauntlet of vendors selling everything from watches with Mao frantically saluting every second to "mag-a-nets" the size of the wall itself to "genuine imitation" (I swear they actually said this) purses, clothing, jewelry, etc. And they did not want to take "no" for an answer.

As if this wasn't daunting enough, we then passed through a short, single lane tunnel competing for space with cars and buses who all seemed to be playing a game called "pick off the tourists" (personal safety is apparently not a big issue for the Chinese people) to climb the steps that led to the Great Wall.

Our guide explained that if we went left on the wall, we were following in the footsteps of Nixon and other great (?) world leaders. In fact, all eighty gazillion Chinese people went left when they came to visit. If we went right, we were a bunch of weak little American sissies who needed our mommies to wipe our noses.

Naturally, since it was a matter of national pride, we all headed left and, after about ten minutes of foolish bravado and excruciating pain, we realized we should have wimped out and gone right and to heck with being macho (Meanwhile, all the Chinese people who, in actual fact, go right were having a good laugh at our expense!).

The first incline really wasn't too bad. It was only at about a mere forty-five degrees. Even the first flight of steps wasn't too bad. There were only two dozen that randomly ranged from two inches to twelve inches in height. It was the second through 142nd inclines and flights of stairs that did us in, where the incline increased to ninety degrees and the steps became the stuff of nightmares. Oh, and did I mention that the only railing was about six inches off the ground, so you couldn't even pull yourself up? I hadn't realized that they had consulted with the Marquis de Sade when building the wall.

Except for a few fitness freaks of nature, we pretty much dropped like flies. At each and every plateau, we found someone waving the white flag and trying not to cry like a baby. This thing would have brought Jack LaLane to his knees! Most of us tried to push on to the fourth tower and end of the section, but we were just kidding ourselves. Oh sure, maybe if we'd had two weeks, a Sherpa and a system of pulleys and levers.....maybe. But an hour to get up, down and back to the bus???

We tried to make the most of it though, stopping to admire the scenery and take photos, but it was really all a cover. What we were actually doing was gasping for breath and surreptitiously checking for signs of heart attack and stroke.

Meanwhile, an eighty-year-old Chinese man with a cane passed us by around the third tower as though he was merely out for his daily constitutional around the block. To add insult to injury, when you finally did drag yourself up to the next tower or plateau, there were vendors waiting for you with tables and trays and cases full of more "genuine imitations", T-shirts and paintings.

I like to imagine that they are air-lifted up to work each day since I could barely drag myself up that far. Either that or they simply live up there, coming down to visit the family on holidays and replenish their supplies. Any other explanation is unacceptable in my fantasy land. You almost want to buy their stuff just to applaud their stamina. (Although if they were selling oxygen tanks, they could make a killing).

Coming down was only slightly less traumatic than going up. First of all, the vendors knew this was their last shot (forever), so they began chasing us and pushing their wares in our faces, rapidly dropping their prices ($60...okay $30). Fabulous. The wall wasn't enough of a challenge, now we had a human obstacle course to maneuver around.

Stairs that had seemed impossibly steep on the way up now looked like ladders that you were somehow supposed to go down forwards, without taking out the two hundred other people struggling to climb up.

They told up that when the men building the wall died, they were simply buried in the wall (we suspect they died because they wanted to). It made us wonder if the renovated sections might not be filled with hapless tourists who decided to turn left instead of right!