Some days adventures go wrong, some days they go right. This day was both of those.
After several years of harassing a dear friend to go with me on a short trip to China, she finally conceded and said she would join me. And I proceeded to take her on adventures we would never forget.
“Some days adventures go wrong, some days they go right. This day was both of those.”
The Great Wall - Simatai
As a general rule, I avoid going to the Great Wall due to all the foot traffic from tourists. It's too overwhelming to be surrounded by thousands and thousands of people trying to go up and down hundreds and hundreds of steps. BUT whenever I go to China with a first time visitor, I offer them the opportunity to visit all the typical China #touristy places. So that is how I ended up going to the #GreatWall.
We were picked up from our hostel and taken on the drive to Simatai. I had been to this section of the wall before and knew that there were "short cuts" that went through the neighboring area instead of going up and down the unending stairs on the wall. I told my friend that if she got tired of stairs that we could take this shortcut. We quickly grew tired of the misshapen constant steps. Once we got to the starting point of the #shortcut, I convinced her that we should go that way. Shortly after we started on this dirt trail it started to rain... a lot... with thunder. We were surrounded by trees and shrubs, soaking wet and hearing the thunderstorm get closer and closer. As if this wasn't enough, this trail that I'd taken several times before had grown over in abundance. At one point we almost turned back to the Great Wall when the fork in the trail that I remembered was more of a one way trail with a heavily grown over trail - and I KNEW that we needed to go on the grown over trail. Understandably, she was not confident in my memory of which trail to take due to all the growth BUT after much discussion she decided to trust me. We pushed through the shrubs and I kept reassuring her I knew it was the right way - even though I was beginning to doubt myself.
After a good 1/2 mile of this trail and hearing (presumably) wild donkeys near by the trail, we finally reached an opening that brought us back to the Great Wall. That day I decided to never take another "shortcut" near the Great Wall without a guide (as I'd always done in the past) BUT secretly, I'm pretty sure I'd do it again if the opportunity presented itself. I mean, it's not like we ACTUALLY got lost. And it's a whole lot better than being surrounded by seas of tourists!
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