Great Wall pictures

There are many, many quotes from travelers who marvel at how the Great Wall of China snakes through the mountains, and they are all completely understandable. You think you understand, but you can't really grasp the idea until you are actually looking at it follow the curves of the mountainside. From what I understand, the area to the left of the wall is China proper and to the right (perhaps in the distance) is Inner Mongolia (the Autonomous Region of Mongolia, if you ask the Chinese).

As I said in my previous post, this section of the wall has a river running through it. At the lowest point, there is a bridge going over the water connecting the two sections of the wall. If you look closely enough, towards the left you can see the dam on the water.

One part of one of the climbs from one of the watchtowers to the next. We did this a lot. This one doesn't have steps right here, it's more of a slope, but you can see how stairs would be trecherous.

The ladies who were following us around got very nervous when we climbed up on the wall, but don't worry. There was a sort of ledge a couple of meters down behind us.

There was no ledge below me here, however. This is nearing the very top of the section we could climb. I believe we were around Watchtower 7 or so, and there are 12 in total.

This was taken on the opposite corner of the same platform as the picture before. We borrowed the hats from two of the guys in our group.

I took this picture from as far up as we could go. These are watchtowers 13-16. You can see how it is crumbling so much that it makes sense not to allow simple tourists to go climbing on it.

Marianna, me, and Lane. Don't worry, we didn't really jump!

This is the whole group who climbed up Simatai that day (plus Karinna, she got cut off on the right side). Woot woot!