The Night We Almost, Accidentaly Slept on the Great Wall

Gina and Zhang Lijie are both Chinese but have somehow never been up to the Great Wall -- whci I think is crazy -- so around 7pm last night, we decided to go hiking. Crazy as we are, we took the hour and a half hike up that I have done before and even managed it in about 1 hour.

However, as I'm the only one who thought to bring a flashlight and it was getting quite dark, we decided to hike along the wall and take an easier path down instead of risking the steep and narrow one we had just come from. This was all well and good except that it started to get darker and darker rather quickly and we had only a vague idea (from the map we always show guests but didn't think to bring with us) of where the path was. We hiked (mostly downhill) for a while, but finally called Tana who is more familiar with the area. She told us we had gone too far and to go back 2 towers or so. Determined, we turned around and began the climb back up. I cannot express how steep the wall it, but we were quite relieved when we got there until we found a large map showing that the path began about where we had just come from.

Luckily, there was a man in a shack on night duty there so we asked him and he confirmed our fears: we had to go back downhill about four towers. He offered to show us the way so we now had 2 flashlights and very sore legs. We walked with him and somehow walked past the correct tower and had to turn back once again -- but only for 1 tower this time, but just as steep. We were very relieved when we got to the path, but the fun was not over. We still had a half hour hike down many, many steps. We had exhausted the 500ml of water I brought for the 3 of us long ago so we were very happy when we saw there was staff in the closed shop at the base of the wall. We all bought water and then called the night driver to pick us up and take us back to Beigou.

If you're still wondering, the title refers to the many, many times we almost gave up and just slept on the wall. On the other hand, we are talking about really camping someday -- might take a shorter path though :)