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A short (thousand-kilometre) train ride later we reached Beijing, where we climbed a certain famous wall while learning about Mongolian hordes. A wall that robs you of your breath, replacing it with awe and disbelief that mere humans could build something this expansive just to stop other humans from killing and enslaving them.
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Adam Fletcher (Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places)