How a travel adventure with Leigh Sales helped me reconnect with the preciousness of life

Most tourists ended up at the concreted, rebuilt sections of the wall. Visiting China’s famous architectural feat had become a feat of endurance as they fought their way through the crowd. Noisy buses blowing out dirty exhaust would disgorge visitors from early in the morning. An hour later they’d clamber back on, laden with gaudy souvenirs that would end up gathering dust back home, or would be gifted to a young relative who wouldn’t question the trinket’s authenticity.

The wild wall, we were told, was untouched and mostly out of reach for time-constrained tourists. This adventure of ours was going to be an all-day affair and Gustav the Swedish count had promised it was worth the effort. We would make our lunch booking for 1pm but deliberately arrive far too early. We’d then suggest to hotel staff that we’d take a look at the wall while we waited for our table.

We made the lunch booking for later that week and, on the day, our driver arrived as planned outside our friends’ apartment. He had no English and we had no Mandarin but he’d been given a rough outline of the scheme and we joined the traffic jam getting out of Beijing. Every now and then he’d turn and speak, gesticulating with rapid hand movements while keeping his knees attached to the wheel. We assumed he knew where we were going. We certainly didn’t.

An hour later we hurtled past the tourist buses at Badaling, a drop-off place for regular Great Wall visitors, and 20 minutes later slowed down in front of a private gate guarded by armed security officers. There was nothing to indicate what was beyond it. Our driver turned to us and shrugged his shoulders, his face questioning if this was our destination. We shrugged back.

Whatever he said to the guards encouraged them to open the gate and we entered a vast expanse of summer greenery, driving past secluded villas built in earthy colours, poking out from behind pockets of trees.

He deposited us at the hotel reception and these two Aussie tourists, dressed in shorts and covered in sunscreen, walked into an almost-empty lobby. A lone staff member peered at us from the front desk. “We have a reservation for lunch,” we told her.

She glanced at her watch with a look that told us we were far too early for the reservation.

“But before lunch we’d like to climb the wall,” Leigh added, her voice echoing off the cool tiles on the floor.

In broken English, the woman responded with words that crushed us.

“Oh, we are very busy today and the wall is not open.” Our mouths dropped open and we turned our heads slowly to remind ourselves the lobby was completely empty. “Not open? The wall’s not open?” we asked, bewildered. Our carefully constructed ploy was already starting to fall apart.

“But we want to climb the wall,” Leigh added firmly.

“Which wall?” the receptionist asked, delivering the words in English slowly.

“Um, the Great one?” we tentatively suggested, wondering if we’d missed something. There was a small sign of acknowledgement on her face. “Go straight and security will tell you.”

We were so relieved we almost skipped out of there, but as we wandered outside and looked for signs or the promised security officers, we found neither. We strolled along a track that wouldn’t have been out of place on a hike through the bush in Australia. There was no sign of any wall, let alone a Great one, and we wondered if our excitement had been misplaced.

We finally spotted a small weathered wooden sign stuck into the ground. It was about 10 centimetres tall, with faded painted letters. “To Great Wall,” it read with an arrow. We followed the grassy path for another 20 minutes, veering up a steep climb past scattered rocks. We wondered out loud if we were already on the wild wall. Was the wild wall so overgrown that we were walking along the broken remains of it and didn’t know?

For years after, if either of us felt our spirits sagging, we would remind each other of the awesomeness of that day and the tantalising prospect that another magical moment could be waiting just around the curve of an overgrown path.

LISA MILLAR, ABC JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR OF DARING TO FLY

And then, as the trail curved, the bushes opened up and we lifted ourselves into a vista that took our breath away. For as far as we could see, the Great Wall of China stretched out in front of us, up and over mountains and beyond. And for the next hour it was ours. We scrambled up ramparts, the steps forcing us onto our hands and knees. We posed for photos in the rectangular openings at the top of watch towers, laughing as we mimicked the hotel receptionist asking us: “Which wall?”

“What if we’d said to her, ‘Um, the not-so-great-wall? The one built in 1956?’ ”

Our giggles could be heard by no one. We were entirely alone. In some places the wall was in such disrepair, with trees growing up through the crumbling rocks, that we’d have to leap down into the long grass and find a way to climb back up onto it.

Ants stung our legs, and we’d been warned about virus-carrying mosquitoes, but nothing could take away our exhilaration. Each turn and bend in the wall opened up another sweeping view.

We walked until we reached a fence and, far beyond it, we saw the tiny dots of human tourists who were crowding into the restored and concreted part of the monument. If only they knew what was on the other side. If only they could see what we’d seen.

We reluctantly turned back. When we reached the spot where we’d first glimpsed the wall, when we’d wondered if we were even on the right track, we hesitated. Stepping off the bricks would signal the end of this adventure and neither of us felt able to do it.

“We may never, ever have an experience like this again,” we said with a tinge of sadness. On our return we were ushered into the almost-empty restaurant as if we’d been simply strolling around the grounds for the past two hours. We took a stab at the menu and ended up with tasteless chicken gristle but washed it down with a glass of wine each. The lunch had been a means to an end and we weren’t bothered.

We felt we’d been granted a remarkable wish, something so rare and magnificent, so uplifting, we glowed with pleasure. For years after, if either of us felt our spirits sagging, we would remind each other of the awesomeness of that day and the tantalising prospect that another magical moment could be waiting just around the curve of an overgrown path.

Edited extract from Daring to Fly (Hachette) by Lisa Millar, on sale September 1.

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This article appears in Sunday Life magazine within the Sun-Herald and the Sunday Age on sale August 29. To read more from Sunday Life, visit The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

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