So many similar Great Walls of China

A dear (young) old friend recently asked why I'd written "Tom now grasps why eveybody's pictures of The Great Wall of China are from essentially the same perspective" on my Facebook page. Great question, in response to my cryptic remark. What I meant was that it turns out that while the G.W.o.C. may have been the world's longest artificial thing, a lot of it has crumbled away and the main part near Beijing is now less than 50km long and most tourists are funneled to just one location.

Here's the entrance to it:



From that entrance point tourists can turn to climb the wall to the left or the right. Our guide, Alan, who was on his 67th mission to the Wall, explained that the easier walking was to the right but the best views of the rest of the wall were to the left. We went left and the rest of the wall looked like this:



And that's the perspective I think I've seen photographed a million times. Although not always with the 'One World, One Dream' Olympic propaganda carefully situated.

I don't mean to seem too cynical about the Wall or China. We had a fantastic time, fell in love with China (our growing set of photographs are based here), and will return.