KFC is probably the last thing you think of while heading for the Great Wall – yet that was the very first thing i saw when our bus stopped somewhere at the foot of Badaling.

I swallowed the bitter disappointment and together with thousands of other tourists proceeded forward, towards the wall and… towards even more disappointment. I can’t think of enough synonyms of ‘awful’ to describe the commercialization and banality of the experience, basically it comes down to tickling  Chang Cheng off your itinerary, buying kitschy souvenirs and getting the infamous paper which says “I climbed the Great Wall.” Well, i didn’t – i went back to KFC and got myself a coffee.

The Great Wall? You must be kidding, i am from Montenegro, here almost every city is surrounded by a medieval wall of a kind – and Chinese one came across as nothing more than yet another wall…

I am not even sure how Rebecca managed to persuade me to give it another try, yet she did and soon we were on our way to the The Wild Wall, the untouched parts of the fortification… And that’s when it hit me, the realization that i am at one of the most amazing constructions ever built by a man… It is mind blowing and awe inspiring, albeit    it’s not “the only human artifact on Earth visible from the moon”, as the legend goes. 😉

“There in the mist, enormous, majestic, silent and terrible, stood the Great Wall of China. Solitarily, with the indifference of nature herself, it crept up the mountain side and slipped down to the depth of the valley. ” W. Somerset Maugham