Awake at 6:30am to leave by 7:30am we got ourselves organised and headed downstairs Echo the guide for the day met us and we jumped on the bus. Clearly the driver had no idea how to drive a manual car as we jerked forward and back, we bunny hopped I think for a lot of the way there.
We arrived at the Great Wall three hours later. It was one of those surreal moments where you think about the amount of times you had seen it in a book or travel magazine or on TV but I'd never actually imagined myself being there, it was quite incredible. Aimee, Bec and I caught the cable car up to the top instead of the 40 minute stair climb, being at the top for the first time I said to myself "now I feel like I'm in China". We'd spent the last couple of days pottering around as if we were in Sydney city at least that's what it felt like to us. No, this moment was something entirely different.
The view from the top was beautiful completely surrounded by mountains under a clear blue sky which we were told is not very common, we have definitely been quite lucky in that sense everyday apart from one has been gorgeous.
We strolled along the wall though it was hard to look at the view while walking because you could potentially go flying on an uneven ancient paver or step. You had to admire the ingenuity of construction, how on earth did they get all that stone up there? The easy answer is it was all hauled up there but how exactly? 6000km of stone........200 years to build, definitely a wonder of the world.
Each guard tower we reached was incredibly cool inside and a nice short break from the blazing heat and humidity outside. We reached number 13 and had to call it a day, we were all quite dehydrated even though we were guzzling down water every minute. We decided to take the toboggan back down which was awesome fun we 'fanged' it all the way until we caught up with a rather large lady in purple who was on her toboggan learners.....brake, crawl, brake, crawl.
When we got to the bottom we put our bartering skills to good use, Aimee bought a copper horse and she and I both bought a scroll water colour painting, mine was Panda and hers was a Tiger. All three of us bought a 'year of the snake' stamp made of malachite with our names in chinese etched on the bottom not bad for around $7 each. We headed down grabbed lunch with the group with was quite nice then jumped on the bus back where we got chatting with three Scottish girls who lived in Beijing teaching English.
Once we had got back we had a quick noodle dinner with Snow before going to see a Chinese Acrobats show which was pretty impressive, sort of like a small scale Circ de Soleis which only went for an hour and half.
We braved the sardine filled metro back to the hostel and settled in for a 9am checkout.
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