Yellow Hills

Saturday was spent traveling to the Great Wall, after having settled in Beijing earlier this week. The city-wide urban renewal policies are most evident as seen from a dusty stretch of highway leading westward toward the mountains. Entire neighborhoods known as hutong have been reduced to rubble by groups of migrant workers who go from site to site with nothing but sledgehammers and the clothes on their backs. The foundations are left in neat lines, like graves along the side of the road. In an adjacent district, tall, modern apartment buildings are being erected. Each has a large crane on top, and some are simply metal skeletons wrapped in bamboo scaffolding, ready to be completed. Beijing is dominated by cranes. They have an eerie quality when they are still, especially at dawn -- looming like a fleet of alien arbiters.
In the wintertime, the countryside is a sweep of brown and pink rock, dotted by scraggly sun-bleached pines. The Great Wall is incredible and beautiful; it seems to be such a natural and fluid element of the landscape when you see it snake along the tops of the hills then plummet over a distant ridge. From the top of one tower I could see the mountains extending into the wastes, like the knuckles two interlocked hands.

The Great Wall at Ba Da Ling.

Tower summit.

A path to the Great Wall.

View to the northeast.

Where I called my parents from.

Locals.