Who’s the greatest ‘Wonder’ of them all?
Evan England
I’ll be honest. I committed one of the main faux pas of travelling on this journey, I went to a destination purely to tick something off a list. I was a "Wonder Hunter," a collector of silhouettes and geographical trophies.
However, I’m giving myself a pass. Given the sheer scale of the site and the physical toll it exacted, I’d like to think I paid my dues in full.
For context, I was in India a few years ago (watching Australia clinch the World Cup, no less) and met two sisters at the Taj Mahal. As a side note, I’ve found people react oddly in front of the worlds great sites, but these two were uniquely excited. Partly as it was their seventh wonder, but also the final piece of a collective puzzle they had solved together. Sitting there in the shadow of the Taj, I realised you could ask seven different people what their favourite ‘new wonder’ of the world is and get eight different answers, mostly because people don’t know what they are! Myself included. I was sitting in front of one, sure, but beyond that, no real idea.
The Year of the Horse, specifically 2026, the year of the Fire Horse, is defined by a triad of virtues.
Speed, Freedom, and Perseverance.
Though I arrived slightly ahead of the lunar calendar, the "Yang" energy of the season felt remarkably present.
Before we begin though, consider the Chinese obsession with numerology. Their most auspicious wedding dates are 8/8 or 9/9, phonetic anchors for wealth and longevity. Conversely, elevators often skip the fourth floor, the number sì sounding too dangerously like the word for death. In that spirit, I offer my own tally for the journey: 37,731; 30.46; 486; 4 and 1.
I want to begin, as Jeremy Clarkson might roar, with “Speeeed.” I adopted this element by spending a frantic 72 hours in China, 48 of which were tucked away in Gubeikou, in a remote part of the Great Wall’s walkable terrain. I stayed in a magical B&B with six other travellers, two of whom were Canadians on their way to move to Australia, a poetic, somewhat reversal of my own path. They had been up on the wall the day I arrived and told me there was an option to start in the village and walk along it to a spot where you could descend and pay a local to take you back.
Perfect.
So, with that decided, our host cooked an amazing Chinese meal, after which we translated conversations, had a few beers and naturally made a TikTok before I turned in for an early night, with the hope of being up on the Wall for sunrise.
The Great Wall certainly tested me on the perseverance front, I was, at points, on my hands and knees climbing up near-vertical steps in darkness. Madly, at this point I realised I didn’t ask the girls how long the walk was or how long it took them. I found myself shocked at my own lack of fitness and, in turn, my ignorance as to the potential challenge before me. I had a ‘bum bag’ with my phone for photos and some sunscreen, that’s it. At one point, I managed to accidentally wander off the wall into a demilitarised zone. For reference and to save some face, not all parts of the Great Wall look like the pictured ‘tourist spots’, in parts it’s hard to tell what’s a mound of dirt and what’s an ancient World Wonder.
That being said I managed to re-enter the "highway of the Ming" but not without a small challenge as it required me to scale 18 feet of old, skeletal scaffolding. It was a gangly, ungraceful scene testing the Chinese surveillance and a far cry from being a majestic stallion. Nevertheless, I made it back onto the top and continued the journey. I had certainly reached a point of no return now. My next hurdle was the lack of water, fortunately a watchtower a few km’s further along I found an esky of water bottles and a QR code which I assumed meant I could buy one..So again, testing the surveillance I bought one, I think, and moved on.
Mundane tasks aside, as I was walking along, the perseverance point took on deeper meaning; I was taking a reverse gap year at the time and becoming increasingly conflicted by how phenomenal my travels had been, but also feeling guilty about how deep I was having to dig sometimes to do all this travel, and I guess in part, a pressure to enjoy it.
The final element of the Year of the Horse and what it represents is freedom, the most subjective of all travel currencies, the concept is inherently ambiguous. However, on reflection for me, what made this wonder the most spectacular was that over those eight hours or so, spent incredibly alone, there was a genuine sense of freedom and liberation that is extraordinarily hard to come by, at least for me.
There is a profound irony here: many of the freedoms we take for granted are absent in China, and the wall itself was built to halt the world’s most mobile cavalry, the Xiongnu and the Mongols. Yet, in a stark Ming-era contradiction, the wall was designed with mǎdào (horse tracks), wide ramparts allowing messengers and cavalry to gallop along the top. In those hours, I felt the freedom of a horse on the wall, no longer crashing against the structure, but finally finding my stride upon it. Albeit slowly.
The Chinese core operating system for language is symbols and metaphors, in which I am getting swept up. But it was the combination of these elements, the speed of the trip which had a scarcity effect on my experience, the culmination of many years of travel actually resulting in a tangible "achievement," and a peace and quiet without social media thanks to China’s "Great Firewall." Not to mention my proclivity to judge things that have scale to simply be better, that I think led me to the conclusion that the Great Wall simply can’t be rivalled amongst its peers. At least until you speak to the next person of course.
The Fire Horse Year tells us that 2026 is ‘not just a journey, but a spectacle.’ And after 37,731 steps, 30.46km, and 486 vertical flights, having seen exactly 4 people (that auspicious number of death) and survived on 1 bottle of water, I can tell you: I wasn’t much of a spectacle myself. But the Great Wall? It was everything, and more.