Great Wall of China!!!

Great Wall of China!!!

Beijing, China, Asia

I got to see the Great Wall today, and it has totally saved my trip to China. It was incredible! It started out with a way-too-early wake up call of 5am, and the driver was at the hostel to pick me up at exactly 6am. The whole day trip cost 270 yuan ($42) and that included transportation, entrance to the wall, breakfast and lunch. The breakfast was an underwhelming start with a McDonald’s sausage mcmuffin and a coffee. I don’t drink coffee, so I just had the muffin.

There were some really nice people on the van from America, so at least I had people to talk to on the way up there. It was a three hour ride from Beijing to Jinshanling and there wasn’t much to see in between. It was at this point that I was really happy I’d thought ahead and brought my laptop with me. I watched a few episodes of some TV shows to pass the time.

We got up to Jinshanling and it was noticeably cooler. I’m glad I brought my gloves up there with me or I would have been forced to buy a pair from one of the six million women selling crap up there. Our group was about twenty people and we all started walking up the hill to get the wall. There was a wall of women lined up on both sides of the street and when people walked by they each picked a couple of people to follow. They didn’t really talk to you, they were just right next to you, and I’m sure at the end of the day they would want a fairly hefty tip, for god knows what. I made sure to tell my shadow straight away that I wasn’t going to buy anything from here and I didn’t need a guide for the day. She got the idea and latched onto someone else pretty quickly.

We got up to the wall at the Shalingzhai tower and it was incredibly impressive! The tower itself is nothing to look at, and even the wall is not too attractive, but when you get a look in the distance at how far this wall snakes through the countryside, it’s amazing! We got really really lucky with the weather today so we could see for miles and miles. I walked with four other guys from Germany and Ireland, so it was nice to have some company up there.

We were given four hours to walk on the wall and I thought that was going to be way too much time. It was a perfect amount of time because we walked east to the Five Window Tower and the wall just kind of stopped. There was no way to continue on unless you climbed down off the wall and then found your way back up onto it. It took us about two and a half hours to get there, so we had to just turn around and head right back. The wall is incredibly steep at some parts and the stairs (on the parts that actually had stairs) were probably each two feet tall. That really got the legs feeling like jelly. The way up was pretty exhausting, but of course the way down was more painful on the legs, so we took a rest halfway down and got a few beers to enjoy on the wall. It was a pretty cool moment sitting down in the sun, not a cloud in the sky and looking around to see the Great Wall snaking over the top of every mountain we could see.

We got down to the base just in time for our buffet lunch at 2:15pm and I was much more impressed with lunch than I was with breakfast. We headed back to Beijing at about 2:45pm and had another three hours to get back. I watched the movie Shooter to pass some time and we got near the city center at 5:30pm. There was all kinds of traffic in the city so I chose to hop off the bus and get the metro home. I figure it saved me about an hour of sitting in traffic in the van. I got back to the hostel and met up with Aleeda who had chilled here all day. We went out to Wangfujing to have a quick bite to eat and I’m back at the hostel and in bed already. The combination of getting up at 5:30am and the ten mile hike up and down the mountains was enough to put me in bed by 8:30pm. I’m not embarrassed, haha!

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