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Published: November 10th 2006
Arrived in China at about midday on Monday and was surprised how cold it was. We managed to get a bus to the area where our hostel was but then we were stuck. Chinese maps are not very useful. We asked several people for directions but as we discovered not many people spoke English. The ones that did gave us totally different directions and left us walking around in circles. Luckily two girls who are staying at this hostel saw us and took us there. The rest of our first day consisted of getting something to eat, having a few beers and catching up on some well deserved sleep.
Tuesday we did a 10km trek of The Great Wall of China, which was fantastic. I didn't realise there would be quite so many steps though and the part we did is known for being a difficult path and extremely steep. There was several of us doing from the hostel and it took Erica and I just over three and a half hours to complete it (and we were the first back!!). So in the evening we decided to treat ourselves to Peking duck (with pancakes etc.. yummy).
On Wednesday we attempted to find our way to Ming's Tomb, but didn't manage it so we ended up at the Temple of Heaven. This has large gardens around it and several buildings to see. One of them is the Echo Wall which is a circular wall that reflects sound waves. If you stand on opposite sides you can hear each other, very strange.
On Thursday we made it to Ming's Tomb, there are three of them but only one is excavated, that one being Ding Ling and the bus dropped us off outside. This is the only we one we actually saw as it was not as impressive and it was extremely busy. The bus journey there was also a ball ache, especially hitting the rush hour traffic on the way back. I will never complain about my journey home from work again...
Toady (Friday) we went to the Forbidden City which was a lot better than the Tombs. The City is a lot bigger than I imagined it to be. We visited the Palace Museum which was interesting and there were some lovely gardens there too. We also went to Tian'anmen square as we wanted to see Mao (an emperor I think) who has had his body preserved, but it was closed when we got there.
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Me on The Great Wall Of China
