Day 72 September 26 - Beijing - The Great Wall
Photos of the Great Wall can be seen here
Well I woke around 9 (probably a little late for what I was trying to do) and had breakfast of a big omelet. Then it was off to the wall, the section that I was hoping to do was about 80km outside Beijing so it meant some fun travel on random buses. The first bus was a mini bus for a little over an hour where my legs didn’t fit in the seat (not that it would bother anyone else). When I alighted from this bus I caught a taxi the remaining 75km round trip and this was about $25 AUS. I eventually made it to a place called Jinshanling and was going to do a 10km section.
On the drive in it was amazing you could see remnants of the wall on most of the ridges alongside the road. One funny thing was after being in the car with the driver for about 20km he suddenly put on his seat belt then 300m later we went through a police checkpoint then he took it off again. You don’t realise how high up the wall is, to get to it from the car park would probably be about 50 vertical meters because it is built on the ridge. When i embarked in my thongs I was told you wont make it to Simitar(end of the walk) in thongs. Everyone was wearing massive hiking boots(and some with hiking poles) that weighed a tone and you could see them struggling. The thongs were fine I never missed a beat.
The wall is quite a hard walk because it follows the ridge all the way. You continually are climbing up a steep ascent just to go down a steep decent then do it all again. I don’t think the section was 10km because I Was worried I would not finish before dark and ended up finishing early. One of the highlights were the turrets, most of them you could not get up the top, but I managed to rock climb up one that had a great view. Someone had a shady pile of rocks to help.
Along the wall I was met an Australian couple so we all walked together and had a good time. At the end they were setting up for a vogue photo shoot so it was the perfect opportunity to strut some of our stuff.
