Our trip to the Great Wall deserves an entry all to itself, mainly because it was, well, great! Oh yeah and also because it’s one of the Wonders of the World, can apparently can be seen from space and is a man-made structure stretching for approximately 2,000 kilometres.
We decided that we would get a tourist bus to the Wall. There are a number of sections of the Wall that are open to the public. The closest ones to Beijing are the best restored areas, with little remaining of the original wall and are always packed with tourists (there’s a trend going on here!). Our plan was to travel to a section which is less popular with tourists as it is over 3 hours away, called Jinshanling and do a 10km hike to another area called Simatai that would take about 4 hours. Unfortunately when we arrived in Beijing we discovered that the Simatai section was closed to the public for repair so our revised plan was to hike from Jinshanling and turn around halfway. Easy.
We boarded the bus at 6am and received a “boxed sandwich breakfast” of a Sausage McMuffin and Coke from McDonalds! Mmmm, yummy, particularly at that hour. Breakfast aside, the journey to Jinshanling was uneventful and we caught our first glimpses of the wall about half an hour before we reached our destination. Once we got there, we were shown the map, the best route to take and told to be back for lunch in 4 hours. So we hopped on the cable car to the top of the mountain and off we went. There was huffing and puffing and panting along the way but it was worth it for the views we saw. The weather was brilliant and definitely the best we had in China.
Anyway, enough of the talking; let the photos speak for themselves…
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