My Journey of becoming a TCM Physician Series: Chapter 4 And the travels (adventures) begin! – Great Wall Beijing

great-wall-china-beijing

As we started our semester in September, weather was fast in transition to winter. In Beijing, basically the weather in the morning would determine how the weather would be for the whole day. So if its windy in the morning when you woke up, it would be windy throughout the whole day. And so it was the first time I experienced typhoon, sand storm, heavy heavy haze (trust me, the haze in Singapore at its peak was nothing comparable to that in Beijing). Leaves were really turning colors and falling day by day, just as it should be in autumn.

Well, life wasn’t as dull as just studying because the whole bunch of us were aiming to travel all over China by the end of two years, beginning in Beijing.

I still remembered there was the first Golden October Week where China would celebrate its birthday and it would be a one week holiday for the whole of China. So immediately after we started school, the one week holiday came in the blink of an eye. Adventurous as we were, a few of us decided to conquer the Great Wall of China within one day of that Golden Week.

And we chose a day out of random and decide to go to the most secluded, inaccessible, challenging part of Great Wall which was not for the normal tourist. Gangho and fearless, isn’t it? The journey to that part of the Great Wall took almost 4 to 5 hours because we needed to travel to the very outskirts of Beijing. I can’t remember what the part of the Great Wall that we chose to go was called but it was definitely not Mu Tian Yu or Ba Da Ling. Nevertheless, we were near to the base of the Great Wall when we realized that there was not much crowd. We thought that would be great because one of the reasons that we chose this not famous part of Great Wall to climb was to avoid the crowd. However as we started climbing, we sensed that wind was just a little bit too strong. And one of us checked the weather forecast and realized it was Grade7/8 typhoon that day. (The concept of Grade 7/8 is equivalent to near to stay home danger grade and the kind that would blow the umbrellas away if you are walking on the street). And it would be that sort of wind that would keep blowing us for the whole day as we climbed. Thank you very much. So did we turn back? Of course, not. All of us wouldn’t want to because it was already not easy to reach the Great Wall! So we fearlessly carried on, thinking it ‘should be’ fine. Air became colder as we kept climbing up and the wind seemed to grow stronger when we were on higher grounds. Then I saw it. The reason why this part of the Great Wall was deemed not for the normal tourists. There were sections of the Great Wall when they were just walking paths with no two sidewalls. Meaning it was straight down the cliff at the edge of the walking paths. And note: we were climbing upwards on this kind of paths, in Grade 7/8 typhoon. I literally felt I was about to be blown away a number of times. We had to go on all fours to keep our centre of gravity low and prevent ourselves being blown away! Literally! That was the first time in my life I felt myself so so tiny and vulnerable in the winds. We didn’t comment too much to each other as we climbed but all of us knew it was too all too late now. We just have to keep climbing first. There were cannon stops at certain parts of the Great Wall where in the past the warriors would stand guard in those columns and watched the enemies if there were any. And we were really hiding in those cannon stops whenever we came across them, just to get a breather. By the time we climbed for almost 2 hours, we were quite high up in the Great Wall and air just got colder, dropping to below 0 degrees. I still remembered one of the guys took out an 二锅头 (hard liquor) and shared among all of us. I could imagine how tough the life of the soldiers of ancient China would be to stand guard on the Great Walls. But I kept beating myself inside for coming along on this trip, especially when the bouts of wind kept blowing and blowing and you felt like if you were just not alert enough you would be blown away. Yet it was an unforgettable life memory. Till now, the taste of the wind and the feeling of almost going into zero G and carried away into the winds still stayed with me.

This is but the first of the many adventure travels to come =)

TCM(Traditional Chin Med), TCM Life StoryXiang Jun Limtcm, great wall china, beijing, travels, adventures