Adrenaline in Chinese

As a real adventurer, I am normally not afraid of much. Like Doping controls. No, no! Not because they'll find any forbidden performance-increasing blood cocktails in me, but because I'm afraid they'll confiscate my MP3-Player. Can you imagine how Maroccan and Cuban Hip-Hop make a runner's blood flow?! Pure music doping, completely legal.

But now back to the story at hand. After a very exhausting day on the Great Wall of China, I realized somewhere between Simatai and Gubeikou that I hadn't seen anyone after encountering the 2 Mongolians 3 hours back. Not a soul since. I knew then that I'd have to sleep in one of the watchtowers. Alone. My legs really felt the approx. 10,000 steps I'd overcome on the wall that day and it was getting dark, thus, I had no choice. Not a town in sight. All of a sudden a New Zealander, in a similara situation, appeared out of nowhere. Just having climbed to the roof of the next tower and started to set up our stoves to cook, we heard noises coming from within the tower. Oh, man! Was the watch policeman sleeping in the tower as well? We had be quiet as church mice - sleeping on the Great Wall is forbidden. The Chinese don't take any jokes about that. Now we had no choice. We didn't move an inch, not even to take pictures of the sunset that takes your breath away. We communicated per sms with my handy and didn't make a peep.

"Boredeom is the only sin for which there is no foregiveness." Well, Mark Twain would have been proud of us here! Two hours passed and we were pretty ravenous. But everything rustled. At some point I had to go to the Ladies room so bad that I considered giving the watchman some cash for shutting his mug on our staying there. I went down from the wall and decided to face my fate. Suddenly, I had 2 Spaniards standing in front of me. We laughed our heads off! All 4 of us thought the other 2 were the watchman. They joined us up on the roof.

You experience the most wonderful things in life when you least expect them...