Leeward Camino: Day 4: One of These Things Is Not Like the Other One...

THE GREAT WALL — I could tell you about how the wall was like a spine on the mountaintop. How the slopes ran so sharply down to the valley floor, it was like the hills had been carved by hammer and chisel. There is also the heat to consider, that great swelling of midday sun that baked us, climbing, climbing, our bodies melting ever closer toward the rock. Many things could be said regarding history, regarding momentous feats of man to conquer stone and self. It's a fascinating stretch of earth.

But it wasn't history that stood out to me that day, so much as the bikini models. And the basketball players. Our trip to the Mutianyu section of the wall coincided with two major tour groups — the representatives of the International Bikini Model Competition, complete with event satchels and nation sashes, as well as the Pac 12 All-Star men's basketball team. How we became so unbelievably fortunate, I do not know.

We first noted the unique crowd when sidling into the cable car line, realizing we were sandwiched between strapping college men at least a foot taller than us. Not surprisingly, I couldn't help but notice how attractive American basketball players are. As we eyed their major muscle groups beneath the looming watch towers of the ancient wall, and listened to them argue about who would win in a fight: The Hulk or Spiderman, I wondered how this could possibly be any stranger. No one should ever wonder this. The universe always has an answer for it. In this case, it was the highly-buffed legs of the world's most competitive bikini models. Several dozen of them marched in line toward the cable car entrance, perfect bottoms stuffed into baby blue booty shorts, canary yellow half-shirts making their be-sparkled eyes pop. A menagerie of support staff and photographers accompanied each group.

Kristina and I exchanged eyebrow raises, already leaking the morning's coffee sweat into our yoga pants and dark tank tops. It would seem we'd forgotten our entourage that day, and would have to take our own pictures. Though we did bring our new friend Cly, a young Chinese woman home on holiday. She is a grad student at Oregon State University in Corvallis. When she found out that one of the all-stars hailed from her own Oregon Beavers, she spent the rest of her time on the wall tapping tall men on the shoulder, trying to determine which lanky fella came from the home team. She wanted to show him the OSU T-shirt she had in her backpack.

I lifted this picture from the Utah athletic department site, but we were totally there for this. Somewhere sweating in the background.

Unfortunately the groups' tours were brief and seemed highly controlled. What I wanted was some dramatics between the ball players and the models. Some Great Wall trysts to live down in infamy. Would the seven-foot tall player from Utah sweep the tiny Italian beauty off her feet? Would a heart-sick point guard get mired in a love triangle between some South Korean chick and her Australian competition? And would handsome Malcom really, seriously, as stated, "bring that babe back to Oregon" with him, and show her a few things about amorous young men from the Pacific states? Not likely. But oh, how I yearned to see feisty pageant managers chasing down horny basketball players. Coaches hauling off weeping models.

Instead I just saw one of the seven wonders of the world, stretched like an endless caterpillar along the precarious mountain ridge. Back in Beijing, a German jazz guitarist sleeping in the bunk next to me said he and some friends spent the previous night on the wall. After nearly three hours of hiding from guards, they were free to stretch out on the cooling stone, take in a spectacular bit of history, free from crowds and chatter and the constant sale of bottled water. I'm not as brave as him, but wanted to be, in order to see more clearly.

Often while traveling, I am struck by the sameness of people and place — not in a mundane manner, but in a comforting, human sense. We are not so strange compared to one another in the end, and our landscapes, while varied, not so terribly different. On a micro level, however, looking into the endless moments of shift that shaped the complex present — from geology to war, from marriage to agriculture — it's then that the world seems so big, so full of small and large histories, mostly unknowable. Lack of time and language and lost information obscure most human stories from my small vantage point, leaving me with an almost unanswerable desire to understand all facets of our earthly humanity. A humanity which appears familiar to me and foreign all at once. Much like the skin I'm asked to inhabit day in and day out.

The skin Kristina was asked to inhabit the day we visited the wall was not her favorite thus far. Between the heat, the constant stair climbing, and not enough water drinking, she became very ill by early afternoon — just as we were descending the mountain to meet our group for lunch. Self-diagnosed as heat stroke, the sudden onset of stomach cramps and muscle tremors prevented her from taking in the experience at all, she said. And honestly, watching her attempt to consume one grain of rice at a time during the spectacular group lunch was proof enough that she was truly suffering. But I argue, perhaps unhelpfully, that the 50 pictures she took while we explored will help her to remember the overall experience. One of them happens to be the best yoga moment of the week, which took place before she was beset by this melancholia of heat exhaustion. Just as she perched on a steep slope along the wall, trying to get into Crow form, one of the Utah basketball players and Associate Head Coach Tommy Connor passed by us.

"Hey I know what that is," Coach Connor said. "A little Crow on the Great Wall of China. Here we go."

With that he perched himself right beside Kristina, and together they tipped their way into position. Sickness or no, I know she will remember this. If not, we've got the pictures. Taken dutifully by me, as per our agreement.