Slide Down the Great Wall

The Great Wall of China is mythic. When people talk about it they almost always--erroneously--note that you can see it from space (NASA's take on the subject: You can't see it with the naked eye, but you can detect it in certain radar images if you really know where to look). Or they say how it's actually a huge tomb, as the bodies of the men who perished while working on it were often buried inside (in fact, there have been no bones, human or otherwise, found in the Wall, though a great number of workers did die while toiling to build it). But no one ever talks about the slide.

Or at least that's what I thought when I visited the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall last week during my visit to China. A two-hour drive north of Beijing, Mutianyu is a small mountaintop village with a beautifully restored section of the Wall that doesn't see nearly as many tourists as the more popular Badaling section (which is where Nixon visited the Wall, and is much closer to Beijing). We were told that October is one of the best times to visit the Wall, and we arrived to cloudless skies, perfect temperatures, and a clear view of the Wall twisting over the mountain's ridges, its granite parapets jutting out like vertebrae in a spine. It was, in a word, spectacular.


  


Post originale: http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/intelligenttravel/2010/11/slide-down-the-great-wall.html