This is a story from my time in China. Ever since I’d started living there, I’d wanted to see the Great Wall. It always fascinated me how something that big could be built centuries ago, the numbers too large to make sense, which only added to the mystique. Ten months passed and I still hadn’t gone. Then my manager told me I’d be heading back home in a month for a different project, so it was now or never. I scrambled to find a tour through an operator I’d used for a few nearby trips, asked our local translator to check what was available, and got lucky. There was a two-day trip leaving in ten days, with the Hushan Great Wall as the main draw.
The catch was that I’d be going alone. I’d never really travelled alone in China before. There had always been a friend or a colleague from the Chinese company with me. I asked around, but nobody was interested, and this was 2017, around the Doklam standoff between India and China, so travelling by myself to a remote part of the country made me think twice. In the end I did what I’ve done before plenty of impulsive decisions in my life. Jo hoga dekha jayega (whatever happens, we’ll deal with it). I booked it.
A friend told me to take a camera and shoot some video. I didn’t own a proper one back then, just my phone, so I used the trip as an excuse to buy a Yi 4K action camera. Eight years later I still have it and it still works as well as it did then.
The Wall
Hushan, or Tiger Mountain, is a restored section of the Ming Great Wall near Dandong in Liaoning, running about 1,200 metres up the mountain right beside the China–North Korea border. It was first built in 1479 to defend against raids from the northeast, and from the higher sections you can look across into North Korea. Of all the places I imagined finally seeing the Great Wall, I hadn’t expected it to be here.
We left early on Saturday, on time like almost everything in China, and reached the gate around 2:30. The bus ride was long but the company made it. We were a mix from all over, and I fell into a long conversation with a guy from Guyana who was teaching English at a school there. We talked about books, politics, freedom of speech, work culture, all the things I couldn’t discuss as freely with my Chinese friends. It was one of those conversations you have with a complete stranger and still think about years later.
The hours passed, and eventually the bus dropped us at the foot of the wall. I started climbing, and it overwhelmed me in a way I didn’t expect. It wasn’t my country’s history and I had no cultural connection to it, but the sheer scale of the thing moved me. Humans are capable of things that sound ridiculous until someone actually does them, and we’ve done them all through history, sometimes for necessity, sometimes for wealth or power or pure ego. Whatever the reason, there I was, walking on one of those ridiculous achievements.
Most people were with friends, so I hiked on alone. After almost an hour I’d left much of the group behind and stood mostly alone on one of the higher sections. I sat down on the steps. It was the same feeling I’d had sitting alone at Chandratal on the Spiti trip, a quiet sense of relief and peace, of having reached something worth reaching. At Chandratal my phone had no signal and I’d had to keep the moment to myself. This time there were bars on the screen. I took out my phone and called my brother, and when he didn’t pick up I called my sister. She answered, and I turned the camera around and showed her the wall. My brother called back a little later, and I showed him too. Some moments are like that. Seeing them yourself isn’t enough, you want to hand them to the people you love.
It was around four by then, the temperature dropping and the light going fast, so I headed back, filming with my new camera along the way. I reached the gate at 4:45 and the group gathered for a photo that’s still buried somewhere in my folders.
It had already been a memorable day. The night would turn out to be even better.
In Search of True Love
We reached the hotel around 5:30. I was sharing a room with the Guyanese guy from the bus. Freshened up and checking my phone, I saw a message in our tour’s WeChat group. One of the guys had found a disco nearby on Google, which in China needs a VPN, so maybe that should have been our first warning about how reliable the discovery was. The club had a name: True Love Disco. I asked my roommate if he wanted to go. Yeah, let’s go. Why not see what kind of club existed near the North Korean border.
A few minutes later a strange-looking group assembled in the lobby: an Indian, a Guyanese, a Brazilian who’d started the whole plan, an American, a Pakistani, and an African guy. Six men from different corners of the world, off in search of true love near North Korea. We left around 6:15. It was cold but manageable, nowhere near as brutal as Dalian where I lived, and I had a couple of layers on. The map said True Love was about thirty minutes away. We grabbed some street food along the way and kept walking.
Then the main roads disappeared and the map started taking us through dark alleyways. One thing I’d got used to in China was how safe I felt, safe enough to walk around at two or three in the morning without a thought. This was different. We were near the North Korean border, walking through dark alleys in a remote city, all six of us foreign, not one of us able to speak enough Chinese to be useful if something went wrong. That was part of the thrill, I suppose. The Brazilian who’d started all this was especially excited about the club, maybe hoping to find North Korean girls in a Chinese disco, maybe something else entirely. Whatever he was hoping for, he didn’t get it. The map told us to take one final turn. We turned, and it was a dead end. No lights, no music, no club. We found what looked like the entrance behind a giant locked shutter. Someone kicked it in frustration, hoping True Love might hear us and open its doors. Nothing.
We cursed the Brazilian for dragging us through half of Dandong and worked out what to do next, since walking straight back felt too embarrassing. The map showed something nearby, the Yalu River Broken Bridge, where you could see across into North Korea. We’d come this far.
The Broken Bridge
The Yalu River Broken Bridge once connected Dandong with Sinuiju in what’s now North Korea. Built by Japan in 1911, it was the first bridge across the river, bombed during the Korean War and never fully rebuilt. Today the remaining spans reach out from the Chinese bank and simply end over the water, a viewing platform pointing at the border.
It was a little underwhelming in person, but there was something in standing beside a bridge more than a century old, one that had held so much history for both countries, and looking across at one of the most isolated places in the world. A few hours earlier I’d been alone on the Great Wall showing my sister the view. Now I was beside the Yalu River with five strangers, looking into North Korea because a disco called True Love had turned us away. The best nights are rarely the ones you plan, and this was turning into one of them.
Then WeChat delivered one last surprise: a rock performance at our hotel at 8, by a North Korean girl band. That got everyone’s attention. True Love could wait. We walked back to the hotel with something to look forward to. Good things have happened every time I’ve taken one of these impulsive trips. Somewhere along the way I’ve become too obsessed with planning, hotels booked, routes mapped, reviews checked, every day accounted for before the journey even begins. Maybe I should start doing stupid things like this again. Less planning, more adventure.
P.S. The girl band rocked. That was my first K-pop experience.
