Friday 31st July 2009 Beijing

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Friday 31st July 2009 Beijing

Our trip to the great wall picked us up at 6.20am so we were once again herded onto a little minibus with other dreary travelers to transport us to another bigger bus to cram us in with even more people and drove for about 3 hours to the Simitai section of the wall. You can only access the wall in very particular designated spots on its million mile span around the world. You can actually get fined if you are found on an un-reconstructed area which is probably good as in some parts it is really in decay and would literally crumble down the hill if every charity organization decided to do a great wall walk. We heard that at times the wall can be like walking down Grafton St on Christmas Eve, especially on weekends and holidays. This tends to be the case nearer to Beijing in a place called Badaling where the wall has been damaged by people actually having raves and orgys on it apparently. Our spot was beautiful though. As you drive nearer and you squint off in the distance you can the see the wall snake its way along the sharp ridge of the hills, as it rises and falls with its natural surroundings. There is a kind of base camp where you depart form as the wall is maybe 1000 feet up the hill face. There is a cable car and mini train that you can take but we hiked up the path. When we got up to where the wall begins in this section, it continues off to our left over a bridge for another few km but requires a separate entrance fee for that so we attacked the 500 near vertical steps to get us to the top. We were being followed by some Hawker women that we had heard of previously who will actually hike up with you for hours hoping that they will guilt you into buying a fan or postcard off them for a Euro, and these women are in their 50s, that’s a hard sell. I managed to ditch our tail with some insistence that our bags were already full so we couldn’t fit a lovely Great Wall snow globe into them. We found ourselves for the next 2 and a half hours walking up hundreds of steps that would just disappear over the top and down the other side, climbing into the famous watchtowers and marveling at just how far it stretched off into the distance, and not meeting too many people at all. It was a beautiful day, and visibility was good and it all added up to one of the highlights of the entire trip I reckon, it’s the great wall for goodness sake, even Breda knows of this one. We had a picnic of a bottle of coke and some Pringles in one of the towers with the most awesome view ever and bought an ice cream for desert off someone who had managed to trawl a fridge and generator up here, wasn’t like that in the days when Genghis Khan and the lads were trying to hop over the wall I tell you.

We took the funniest little train down for part which a couple we met had given us their return ticket for and then hopped on the cable car, well worth the 3 quid, you are on the thing for about 15 minutes as it ferries you in a 2 seater basket down the hill, scary experience for some I’d say. Lunch was included in ticket which turned out to be very nice indeed but the 2 hour wait around afterwards wasn’t, everyone was tired and ready but the busses just wouldn’t leave. Mary couldn’t even go to the bathroom there as it was literally 4 holes in the ground beside each other for all the girls to squat together and have a chat, so she gave that one a miss. Eventually we left for our even longer drive home because of traffic, gas whenever there is a backlog, all the drivers get out of their cars and walk up to have a goo at what is going on, the Chinese are so inquisitive you could call it or maybe nosey, no wonder they love staring at us so much. I did enjoy the drive though; scenery was nice, through lots of farm land where they were growing crops in any piece of 2 foot square land they could find. It was after 8pm when we got back so it was a very long day. We went to a little European restaurant directly across the road from our hostel which was very busy and justifiably so as the food was fantastic, we shared a pizza only but it was great, and only had to cross the road again when we were finished and ready for bed.

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