Going against the grain on the Great Wall

Those who make the torturous climb find the view at the top is worth the effort. Picture / Geoff Cumming

The guide wasn't pushy. He merely explained how he liked to experience The Wall. We could do what we liked.

Most visitors to the restored section of the Great Wall at Mutianyu - once the cable car has hoisted them to roughly the mid-point of the 2.2km edifice - turn right. It's mostly downhill from there. And when you reach the end, a chairlift or toboggan will whisk you down to the hawkers hovering around the carpark below.

But not our guide Josh, an amiable, Vietnam-based New Yorker.

He turns left and walks as far as the fenced-off remains of an unrestored part of the wall, which stretches 5000km from the Yellow Sea to the Gobi Desert.

We went with him, of course. This is, after all, The Wall - begun over 2000 years ago, built over centuries by hundreds of thousands of workers from rammed earth and the bones of those who died on the job. He made our visit sound like a religious experience.

Spiked with Ming dynasty guard towers and the odd bottled-water seller, the section at Mutianyu has spectacular views and is (slightly) less of a tourist magnet than Badaling (although there's still a gauntlet of street stalls and hawkers to run before the cable car which lifts you to the wall).

What Josh didn't tell us was that the last bit is like climbing a staircase.

In 36 degree heat and mid-July humidity, this religious experience has the requisite element of purgatory.

There are 451 steps on the steepest section by my count.

Not your modern, ergonomically-designed steps but uneven granite chunks, infuriatingly spaced: small enough to make one step frustrating but two-at-a-time a strain on the calves. Halfway up, I wonder which body-part will explode first: jelly-like legs, rapid-fire heart or furnace-like head.

They don't tell you this in the guide books. Nor that the sides of the wall are a windbreak on what little breeze there is, making the path a heat-trap.

The last 25 steps are the steepest of all, like climbing a ladder.

It's worth it for the view - though mid-summer skies are disturbingly hazy. But what we can see of the rugged, bush-clad terrain only increases our wonder at this centuries-old feat of toil and blood - and that it failed to keep out the Mongol hordes.

And, just as remarkably, few tourists make it this far.