The Great Wall of China

The Great Wall of China is on the list of the "Seven Wonders of the World" and after visiting it I can appreciate why. The constructed stone wall took over 2,000 years to build, stretches over 5,000 kilometers and was built by hand before modern tools or transportation was available. In fact I am not even aware of any large animals in China to help drag all these stone blocks up the mountain? It's even more impressive when you see the terrain that the building occured. Very dense trees, steep inclines and the weather ranges from snow storms to 95' with humidity. As the stories go, many Chinese citizens were born, worked on the wall and died on the wall only completing a small piece of the construction.

There are seven areas of the wall that can be visited by tourists, 5 of which are near Beijing and 3 that were open during our visit. The Badaling section has a reputation for being busy so we went to Mutianyu section for our visit and we were very lucky as it was not very crowded on the day we went as I think that people thought it might rain so they stayed away. Mutianyu is about a one hour drive outside of Beijing and we hired a private driver that we were able to barter with to about $20 per person. Once you arrive the wall site you walk up through a group of street vendors offering everything from postcards to cold drinks and "best price for you" shouted at every corner. Visitors have the option of walking to the wall (about a 30 minute hike) or taking the tram/chairlift to the top. There are two points of entry both in the middle sections of the wall so you can choose to walk one direction, back track and then go to the other end. We ventured to the highest point of the open wall. The wall is surprisely wide (about 15 feet wide) with carved stone steps with a minimal rise but the wall itself is very steep as it cuts into the surrounding mountain range. (bring walking shoes becuase it is quite a work out!) About every 500-750 feet there is a watch tower that military would stand guard and still be able to see the next post. All of the public sections of the wall have been repaired but it was still in amazingly great shape considering it's over 2,000 years old and has had millions of tourist walk on it. The non-tourist areas of the wall are not in as good of shape and almost completely overgrown with trees and you can see areas of the wall that are falling down. I wonder if at some point there will be a mission to clear out and rebuild other areas of the wall.
Once you've walked on top of the wall gazing out at miles of mountains and the serpenting structure you can either hike down or take an alpine slide to the base. ....of course the boys had to race

It's an amazing structure and somewhat of a bizarre concept to build a wall around a city to both "protect" those inside and "keep out" those on the outside. It stretched over 7 government regimes and cost endless amounts of money.....wait isn't the American government considering something similar on the Mexico border?