Sweet & Sour

Day 31: Beijing (CN). “Confucius say 'Never do long walk with stinking hangover!'”, I joked as we scaled the steep incline. I think my attempt at humour had been lost on Karen as she ignored me and continued to trudge through the deep snow. In keeping with the Chinese theme it felt very much like a very 'Sweet & Sour ' day.

The sweetness was our location – Hiking the Great Wall of China from Simatai to Jinshanling – and in doing so fulfilling one of our lifelong ambitions to visit one of mankind's greatest construction projects. The statistics are mind blowing: The wall is 4,160 miles long, 25 feet high and 15 feet wide – enough bricks were used to circle the earth at the equator with a wall 4 feet high and 3 feet wide . It is estimated that during the Qin Dynasty, 70% of China's population were working on the wall (of which it is said that 3 million died doing so). At it's peak in the Ming Dynasty, the wall was guarded by more than a million soldiers. But the guidebooks and the statistics don't give you the true feeling of this magnificent spectacle. They don't describe the hostile mountainous terrain through which the wall snakes on it's way from Shanhaiguan in the east to Lop Nur in the west. They don't give you a feel of the steepness of the ramparts, some of which Karen and I had to scale on all fours just to make progress. And they certainly don't give you a feel for the awesome beauty of this place, particularly as we found it, covered in a mantle of snow.

The sourness though was our pounding heads. The previous night we had met up with fellow travellers, Dan and Ali for a 'few drinks' and as so often happens on these occasions, those 'few drinks' turned in to a 'let's try and drink China dry' session. Amongst other drinks, we consumed pints of luminous green beer and pints of luminous yellow beer which, because of my state of inebriation, I can't even remember whether I liked or not! The effects of the alcohol combined with a total of four hours sleep was making a difficult hike into an extremely difficult hike.

With my 43rd birthday just a few days away, one of the vagaries of life that I really wanted to understand right now was at what point in my 'maturity' I would learn about the effect of over doing it. Oh well, until then, perhaps I should curl up in this nice cosy watchtower...!