the dragon

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I didn’t know I would have to walk that much today.

“Keep going for another 20k” they had said, “you will find a small settlement with hotels and restaurants there!”

So I walked past the mules…

…past the bushes…

…past the violet flowers…

…walked 20k until I was there – and I was surprised:

Everything was closed, the whole place seemed almost deserted.

There was only one restaurant that was serving guests – though I was the only one:

I had lunch, then I lay down for a while. The only thing I could hear was the owner washing wild mushrooms outside. It felt very peaceful.

I fell asleep.

When I woke up I knew I had to go.

The place was called Great Wall Opening 长城口, and it featured a massive section of the wall that had been restored during the Ming-dynasty:

The restaurant owners told me that they used to have tourism in this area, but then a few years ago the authorities had decided to remove what was left of any relics in this place and rather put them in some city-level museums.

The tourists had stopped coming after that.

Well, there was one today, tourist #1 on the old dragon:

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…me.

By the way, I was never able to find out what sort of relics they were talking about, but I imagined it to be rather small things, maybe from holes in the Wall like this one:

The Wall itself had also suffered quite a bit – it even seemed torn apart in many places:

I wasn’t totally alone here, sometimes I would come across some shepherds with their flocks:

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(hint: watch this video again if you are having trouble going to sleep!)

Well, nothing lasts forever, so at some point in time I had to leave my beloved Great Wall to itself, and make my way back to the road:

It was eight in the evening and I had another 10k to go.

The sun was setting:

…it was setting on all the beautiful things:

…and on all the others:

Well, here’s a long story short:

I was walking in the moonshine…

…and my feet hurt.