I had never really treated myself for my birthday. In fact, throughout my teens and twenties I was usually working on this annual time of reflection and celebration of myself, but towards the end of my 27th year in this incarnation, I decided to do something memorable for once.
I had been teaching English in South Korea for a year and had saved up some vacation time, so I bought a ticket to Beijing and planned to hike a section of the Great Wall for the big day.
On that special morning, I awoke freezing and gleeful in a dorm at the Sitting on the City Walls guesthouse. It was not yet light out, and I crept into the lobby to wait for my minivan out to the biggest man-made creation on the planet.
After about three hours, I and several other travellers arrived at Jinshanling and our guide told us he would wait at the end, at a section called Simatai. It was to be a roughly three-hour trek, depending on our durability.
As soon as we were out of the van and on our way to begin walking along the wall, a panoply of 'guides' came rushing along to 'help' us along our way, carry our bags, explain various engineering and historical feats of the brave souls who built the Wall, and collect some money at the end.
One middle-aged woman with the dexterity of an Ibex attached herself to me and proved to be cheerful company.
The sections of the walkable parts of the Wall are perforated by guard stations that in their time were the brains of this ancient telemetric network, using smoke to signal over thousands of kilometres about news happening at one place or another.
The Great Wall stretches out before you like an endless cobbled snake until you cannot see it anymore, climbing ever further over crags and peaks into the misty horizon, never in a straight line.
Some areas are nearly impassable and quite scary, and if it weren't for the chipper encouragement of my near-elderly guide, I might have turned back for a Tsingtao in the parking lot. However aerobically exhausting the trek was, I felt an immensity of spirit, leaping from stone to stone and viewing the Wall from each new vestige, coupled with healthy humility and tininess, seeing with my own eyes how vast and long the human experience has been and how hard we have worked to shape the planet in our image. It was both daunting and encouraging.
I had a beer with one of the army guys at one of the last stations before Simatai, toasting myself, and him, as well as all the countless people who toiled on that massive structure.
At Simatai we sat down to a massive and delectable feast, tired yet enamoured of what we had seen that morning.
I was proud of myself for having finally done something on my birthday worth telling about. Now, nearly five years later, the Great Wall of China remains the most impressive manmade thing that I have ever seen in my life.
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Nice one, never seen the Great Wall myself, I've only been to the very West of China, but I would love to see it some day.
By the way, it's always a good idea to link to your other page if you copy paste from another blog, to avoid the cheetah comment - some people just see it and think you're a fake, but I guess you are the author of that blogspot blog :)