Great Wall

I don't know what I could possibly say about the Great Wall that could begin to do it justice. Later I'll include some pictures of one of the original stretches of the Great Wall, this one dating from the Han dynasty, that I took in western China, which gives you a sense of how it has changed. Although the Chinese have been building walls since the time of the Qin and the unification under the first emperor, Qin Shihuangdi, the Great Wall that everyone recognizes today is a product of the Ming repairing it starting in the 14th century - whereas the first walls go back over two-thousand years. We visited on a dreadfully rainy and foggy day, which actually made some of the shots even better, although, obviously, we couldn't see very far. It was a horrible weather day, and we were on a stretch of the Great Wall which is not as popular as others, and it was still packed. It was a serious climb up and down, and my colleague Susyn from Champlain, was happy for the fog because she has real issues with high places. The odd thing is that you could look across the valley, on another section of the Great Wall where we were not allowed to climb, and we could see a few people walking - don't know who they had to bribe to get that quiet walk, but it would have been worth the yuan.