Inside a Chinese painting

OG 3-wheel motion.
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So back in China and life has returned to straight random. One night I'm hanging out with Talib Kweli and his entourage at his recent performance in Beijing.





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The next night I'm camping on the Great Wall of China. Amazing. (Real talk!)

Some friends organized the trip and I...tagged along. One of the guys had just bought a car, so I took my first road trip in China. After about a 2 hour drive from Beijing, we arrived to the base of the mountain. Ahead of us: about a 3 hour hike up to the Great Wall.

Luckily I only had a small backpack, which I had borrowed from my friend. The other 3 had these serious hiking backpacks full of tents, sleeping bags, water, food, Famous Grouse, etc. It was a completely different experience than my previous and only other trip to the Great Wall.

[In 2000 my family went to this wack (real talk) part of the Great Wall called Badaling. It was like a zoo with almost as many street vendors as tourists.]

This time, we saw only a handful of other people hiking. Once we reached the top of the mountain, we found the wall to be raw and relatively untouched.



"Relatively untouched." There was still a lady (sitting) who had hiked up the mountain to sell bottled water and tea in that cooler. Also peep my boy rocking the "unbuttoned" look.
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Anyway, from this point we still had to traverse up the wall itself to one of the sentinel towers to encamp. This part of the hike was actually the hardest and a bit scary (real talk). I could not help but marvel at how the Chinese had built this thing. The incline at certain parts turned almost vertical. How did they get all the bricks up the mountain??! The wall was literally crumbling under our feet as we climbed.




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We did make it to the tower right before dark fell, and as my friend Steve said, "It was glorious."



We set up our tents and busted out the Famous Grouse.
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The best part of the trip came when we were sitting on the roof of the sentinel tower in the middle of the night. This fog had rolled over the valley below and all you could see were the surrounding mountain peaks and the tops of the hills below. The sky was as clear as I've ever seen in China and the moon illuminated the landscape so that the hilltops jutting through the fog below looked like islands in a sea of mist.

I felt like I was inside a Chinese painting.



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You can't help but feel the presence of all the history permeating China, and the way the country is modernizing so rapidly makes it such a fascinating place.