Not that the Great Wall at Simatai is exactly paradise. One good thing about the crowds at Badaling is that you can hide better from the relentless postcard and Great Wall souvenir book sellers. At Simatai you're a sitting duck, and the relatively few tourists means that the touts can give you their undivided, personalized service all day long. On our visit, we were hounded by two old ladies demanding that we buy the stupid book. They were really nasty, so we ended up punishing ourselves by refusing to do so rather than forking over the two bucks to make them go away. But that meant we were followed the entire day by the two of them. There's a gondola that takes you up to the entrance to the wall, but apparently touts get to ride it for free, so there's really no shaking them.

The wall is undeniably amazing, as is the setting, but again, the brown air ruins much of the effect. But it's a unique experience to clamber along the wall, and once we walked a bit from the main entry point, we were pretty much on our own (I mean us and the two old ladies of course). It gets pretty steep and the wall gets pretty crumbly at places, but that only adds to the fun. I read that a very high end hotel with villas along some part of the wall has just opened up, and if it's near a fairly remote section, I'd love to stay there and walk for a few days. The ancient architecture and beautiful scenery would be an unbeatable combination. But Simatai is still a worthwhile way to go, flaws notwithstanding.

Some advice everyone will give you, but nobody seems to follow. When you go see the wall, see it at Simatai, not Badaling. Badaling is about thirty minutes from Beijing, and the destination of every tour bus. As a result it's completely packed, even in a China context. I've included a Badaling photo from the internet as a point of comparison, but I've seen it much worse, where you literally don't walk on the wall, you just get carried with the human tide and hope you don't get trampled to death. To make matters worse, this part of the wall is almost entirely a reconstruction. So you must go to Simatai, where the setting is more majestic, the wall is entirely authentic, and there are 99 percent fewer tourists. It's about a two hour drive, but it's an infinitely better experience. I assume you can tell which photo is which, so I won't elaborate.

Sunday morning we took a road trip to see the Great Wall, China's obvious must see destination. As everyone knows, it's the longest wall in the world, and the largest man-made object in the world, stretching along China's barren, mountainous northern frontier for 4,000 miles. I think it ranks among the top couple of sights on everyone's wish list. Although the Chinese manage to take a fair amount of the joy out of the experience, it's still well worth the visit. But before I get to that, I have to say I really don't get the whole idea. First, China was for most of recorded history the world's most advanced/powerful/largest country, and certainly always dominated Asia. It's population is about one hundred times bigger than any of its neighbors (India was usually divided into about 1,000 kingdoms). Then, when you see the northern border, it's huge mountains all over that would seem to be impenetrable by any army. So if you already have a 100 to 1 advantage over your neighbors, and the benefit of an impenetrable mountain range, you'd have to be incredibly insecure to worry about invasions from the north. But the emperors spent enormous amounts of time and money on building and maintaining this thing, from the first wall at 200 BC until the most recent construction around 1400. And I don't understand the thinking that an enemy who was able to scale up these formidable mountains would be deterred by the additional six feet of wall at the summit. But what I really don't understand is that, despite the completely superfluous nature of the wall, it nevertheless didn't seem to deter any invaders. Both the Mongols and the Manchurians penetrated the wall and took over the whole kingdom, which would be analagous to Guatamela successfully invading the US. So yes, China was crazily insecure to think they'd ever need a wall, and the wall failed to stop their complete defeat by tiny border states, which isn't really consistent, but hence my confusion.