beijing paralympics

well, we did have to get back in time for dinner - still hadn’t done peking duck!

ok, a film reference used in vain… but oh did this beer taste good.

having somehow found the energy to run the last leg, i suddenly found myself dizzy and not quite having reached the level… loosing which way is up isn’t a good idea on stone steps all the way up a mountainside. bill, here, says it all…

eeek. at least this bit wasn’t on top of a mountain to compound it.

the funny thing about the great wall, at least the section we hiked - janshinling to simatai - is that you get this immense sense of a fallen civilisation, and yet as a british person used to redbrick buildings, its all somehow familiar. which is a weird feeling, given its one of the most genuinely awesome things you’re likely ever to see: just comprehending the front required to build such a barrier across the highest ridge around is hard enough, let alone reading there’s 56,000 km of it. even if it were a tenth of that, it would still be beyond any scale or man-hours i can imagine. and hello jo, picking her way down.

and those stairs can get quite steep. in fact, further up here i had the “can’t go back, don’t want to go on” moment: you’re on top of an outcrop thats on top of the mountain, the side walls have broken away and your peripheral vision is telling you there’s a lot of nothing surrounding you, the stairs have got steeper and steeper and now the finale is to branch even higher off the ‘floor’ of the wall to reach into a watchtower passageway. yes, i’m not a climber.

and they would build it to skirt along the top of the ridge, too. only just realising its mostly stairs.

standing on our watchtower, watching the sun set out of one end of the passage, i turned to see the moon rising, perfectly framed. this is slightly later, once the orange hues had left and the full moon risen somewhat.

…oh no we hadn’t, and what a sunset it was. the layers of mongolia receding into the distance, as if a carefully graded set of ripped papers.

the spirit of adventure calling, hiking the great wall had to be done. striding up a valley side, sweating despite being in the shade, worrying that we’d missed sunset… cresting the brow to find…