The ex-pats I talked to said it would be easy. Offer a cab driver 300 RMB ($44) to take you to the Great Wall, be prepared to haggle and definitely don’t pay more than 500 RMB ($73).

But when I tried to explain this plan to the woman at the front desk of my hotel she shook her head.

“That’s too much money,” she said. “Take the bus.”

I didn’t have time to take the bus. I had to be back in Beijing by noon, and traveling to the Mutianyu section of the Wall was an hour and a half each way.

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After explaining that four times to the woman at the hotel, she went outside to arrange a taxi. She offered 300 RMB to a cab driver. He wanted 800 ($116). Two other taxi drivers pulled over and joined the negotiation. One wanted 700 RMB and a promise that we’d be back by 10 a.m. The other offered to get a friend to pick me up in 20 minutes.

Just when it looked like my trip to the Great Wall wasn’t going to happen, a 23-year-old security guard who had just finished his shift at the hotel offered to take me for 500 RMB. And that’s how I found myself seated in the passenger seat of a black 2007 Volkswagen Jetta with tinted windows racing toward the mountains listening to Chinese pop music yesterday morning.

(I assume it was Chinese pop. But now that I think about it, it could have been Rain, the South Korean artist who’s big in China. There was no way to find out because my driver didn’t speak a word of English and the only Chinese I know is hello and thank you.)

The Wall seemed minuscule along the ridgeline as we climbed up the mountains. It wasn’t until the moment I got out of the cable car that I realized just how huge and overwhelming it was.

Narrow, steep and massive, it seemed to run on forever across the mountain ridge. It reminded me of China itself and the one word many people use to describe the country: Scale.

That word was what NBA China CEO Tim Chen said was the league’s biggest obstacle in its efforts to build a business in China. Everyone knows the country is massive, he said, but few realize just how massive it is. Major cities like Beijing have 10 million people, but smaller cities like Hefei, a city of 5 million, few people have ever heard of.

Surveys estimate that China will have 221 cities with more than 1 million people by 2025 — six times as many as all of Europe. Chen believes tapping those marketplaces will be the NBA’s biggest challenge in China.

NBA President of Global Marketing Partnerships Heidi Ueberroth said, “You can start in Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, but you have to build out from tier-one cities to tier-two cities. The sheer scale of China is a challenge in that way.”

Like the country’s population and growing cities, the Great Wall is massive and broken into sections that spread across nine provinces and 4,500 miles. Each section is challenging to navigate.

At Mutianyu, steep stairs plunged down 45 feet and back up another 65 feet along the ridgeline. The stairs, which were no more than six inches long, were impossible to walk straight down. I had to do switchbacks — zigzagging my way down and back up — as I walked along the top of the wall. And I was winded almost the entire time.

The views off the Great Wall were tremendous. Lush green mountains rolled on forever beneath powder blue skies. Towering stone guard towers spotted the hills.

It was hard not to look at it and want to see more, and I imagine that’s the way the NBA must feel each time it opens a store or plays an exhibition game in China. This country is huge. Each city is different, but each packs the same scale. And each time they’re exposed to one, they must want to see another.

That’s certainly the way I felt about the wall.

As my 23-year-old driver zipped down the mountains and the Wall faded behind us, I thought about returning to China, coming back and seeing other sections of the Wall. Second- and third-tier sections. Different views. Same scale.