"This Cheng is Pretty Chang"

This past Friday, we set out for Simatai to see the Great Wall (长城, or “Chang Cheng” in Chinese, meaning “long wall”). True to its name, the wall was pretty long – but almost as long as the Great Wall itself was the ride to Simatai. I had previously only encountered Beijing-style traffic, where cars careen around corners, pedestrians and bicyclists scatter, and everyone depends on horns more than traffic lights. The traffic outside of Beijing is the same – but at speeds of over 60 miles an hour, and livestock instead of pedestrians. After the third or fourth time our 80-seater bus screeched around a blind mountainside turn in the wrong lane only to find a van of pigs approaching in the other direction, we all learned to go back to our iPods and ignore the possibility that our deaths would be even more ignominious than Emperor Chongzhen’s.

We arrived intact at Simatai in the late afternoon, and had a chance to briefly climb a section of the wall before it closed (evidently, the Great Wall closes around 6 PM). The section of the wall at Simatai has two parts divided by a river – I only hiked the longer half, which had 12 watchtowers interspersed with long sections of varying steepness. Friday evening we got to the first tower, which was a good vantage point to see almost all of the section across the river.

Saturday morning, we started out at 3:30 so we could see the sunrise (a large group of teachers and students started out at 3:00, but a couple of friends and I wanted a quieter approach). The Great Wall at Simatai, according to the Lonely Planet guidebook, is one of the steepest around Beijing – some parts approached an 80% grade, with nearly vertical staircases. This made for some interesting architecture, but we also found ourselves stopping from time to time to curse the ancient Ming builders (one question that remains: why would you build a wall on the top of a mountain, one of nature’s best defenses? Do the extra 15 feet of rock on top of the several thousand already in place really make crossing that much more difficult?). We paused at the fifth or sixth tower to rest and watch the sunrise, which was easier said than done given all of the mist. In contrast to Beijing’s pollution, though, the mist moved quickly across the wall, alternately covering and exposing wide swaths of the old stonework and masking every other trace of human construction in the thick green mountaintop vegetation.

Simatai is remarkably well preserved, and also one of the few sections to retain the Great Wall’s original Ming Dynasty features. One such feature is irrigation - spigots line the wall, and gutters direct the flow of water away from the walkable areas. I took a picture, in case I ever run into the architect of our constantly-flooding dorm. Drainage, it seems, is a long-lost art.