Three hours climbing stairs and pathways of the Great Wall of China brought up many questions for me, but it only answered one. The one question that was answered went back to my childhood, when my Hungarian grandmother would refer to anything far away as being “practically in Outer Mongolia!”
I never knew what she meant by that, but now I do, because I’d spent the previous week in Outer Mongolia (now known simply as Mongolia) rafting and fly-fishing with FishMongolia.com. We had a three-day layover in Beijing, and the best of those three days was spent on the Jinshanling section of the Great Wall.
It’s easy to visit the Great Wall at spots closer to Beijing, but a daytrip to Jinshanling gets you away from throngs of tourists and gives a better sense of the history that’s stored in those stone steps. We booked spots on a group tour (which was really just a bus transportation to and from Beijing) with BackpackingChina.com.
The 3-hour bus ride leaves early from their small office, which is tucked into a tree-lined Beijing neighborhood with a very confusing address system–our map.me app led us astray. BYO snacks and water; it’s a full day outing with limited access to amenities. The drive itself is a worthwhile tour of Beijing’s periphery, heading through downtown skyscrapers, winding into urban outskirts that lead to little villages and fields with corn drying on the side of the road, and finally out into thickly forested rolling hills.
Mind your step when you walk the Great Wall, especially in the Jinshanling section where few restorations have been made. Crumbling pathways, no added handrails, and no two steps at the same height. Twenty-two watchtowers stretch along this 6 km section, giving it a very Lord of the Rings kind of feel. You can’t walk the wall without imagining 14th century soldiers keeping watch out over the forest for invasions. Historians say that much of the wall was built by prisoners, forced laborers (is that a nicer term for slaves?) and convicts, worked to the bone and literally buried in the wall. It does have a ghostly feel, especially in this lonely winding stretch.
The Great Wall once marked the boundary between China and the wild territory of Chengis Khan, the Huns, and other marauders. Today that green ribbon of mountains that was once part of Mongolia is now an autonomous region under China’s control. It’s known as Inner Mongolia, but the actual Mongolian border is far to the north, out of sight of the wall.
Hiking up to the highest watch tower left us out of breath from the steepness, and breathless from the view that looked back over the wall that spanned the ridge behind us. We shared that view with a local man, who’d set up shop in the watch tower, selling cold sodas to the few tourists who made it that far. That was a commercial as this section gets.
Our bus ride back to Beijing was quiet, mostly from the exertion of hiking those stairs–but also because hiking the wall makes an impact. You can’t help but think about the feet that ran those steps before you, the turmoil that happened on both sides of the wall, the Cultural Revolution that tried to take it down, and lives of the people on both sides of the wall today. That wall was built over centuries to keep out invading armies, and apparently it worked– but haven’t we advanced at all in how we manage boundaries? Building walls is an idea that never goes away, it seems.