11 days of mayhem - day 8

Sunday the 12th of April was the day we climbed the Great Wall of China. We got up at around 9ish and were quite happy that we had left Club Banana at a reasonable hour the night before. We skipped breakfast (silly move in hindsight) and made our way downstairs to find our driver Edward (the one that was recommended to me) waiting for us. He took us to his car (nice sedan with the all important air-conditioning) and we got underway.

I had intended on asking him to stop somewhere to get some breakfast, but there were no immediately obvious options. We asked Edward a few questions along the way, but he had some problems with our accents, so we ended up with some answers to questions we hadn't even asked, which was quite funny. The trip to the wall ended up taking about 90 minutes. Once we arrived, Edward organised some tickets for us and said he'd be waiting for us in the car park whenever we were done. After that, we were on our own.

There are a number of different sections to the Great Wall that can be visited - we went to the Mutiyani section, which has a cable-car which would take us up part of the way and we could then hike in either direction for as long as we wanted (or until we ran out of wall - some sections are closed off as they are too dangerous for the public). We bought ourselves some bananas for a snack, stopped off at a restaurant and had some noodles and beer to keep us going, and then got underway.

The cable-car trip up to the top was uneventful, though I wouldn't have liked to do it if I was afraid of heights. The cars have been in operation for a long time and supposedly have never had an accident, which was reassuring I guess. Anyway, after a pretty quick trip we were on the wall. It's pretty hard to describe how awe-inspiring the wall is when you're actually on it. It took centuries to build, has been around for a couple of thousand years, stretches for more than 8800km, more than 2 million Chinese died during its construction - and we were standing on it! As Shotty and Cookie put it when I asked them what they thought about it: "it's pretty great" (pun completely intended, I'm sure).

We had been shown by Edward that we could walk to the west for a kilometre or two before we would run into a section that was closed off, so we got underway. The condition of the wall was pretty good (had obviously been repaired/restored in parts) and there were plenty of other tourists to keep us company along the way. There were also a number of enterprising locals that were selling drinks and snacks on the wall itself, although they didn't really detract from the experience as you might expect. We took it reasonably easy, soaking everything in and stopping at each new section to take in the surroundings. The walk itself didn't seem too difficult until we got to an extremely steep part right near the end, when it became fairly hard work. Once at the top we were unable to continue any further, so we stopped for a bit of a rest and marvelled at the fact that we were actually climbed the Great Wall of China.

We made our way back and a slightly faster pace, and found ourselves back at the base of the wall within about 2 hours. At this point we noticed a toboggan slide that went down a different part of the wall, and figured we'd give it a try. We paid the fee and got into a different cable car to go up to the section where the slide began. Unfortunately, we found that a lot of other people had exactly the same idea as us, and it took quite a while to get to the front of the queue. Once we finally did, we hit another hurdle - we were told start shortly after the person in front of us had departed. This meant that if that person was slow, we would catch them in no time, and have no real chance to get any speed happening. As luck would have it, that's exactly what happened. A girl and her mother got on right in front of us, and took it vvveeeerrrrryyyy ssssllllooooowwww down the entire course. Shotty, Cookie and I had a bit of fun almost smashing into each other, and we did completely apply the brakes in a few instances so that we could get a bit of distance between us and the people in front of us, but it still wasn't anywhere near as fun as it could have been.

At this time we made our way back to Edward, who was waiting for us near the car park. He suggested that we stop to get some food on the way home, and we were hungry enough by this time to agree. A number of villages are near the Mutiyani section of the Great Wall, and one area that we went through was famous for its fish. Edward picked out a restaurant for us, and after sitting down we noticed that we were right next to a pool of fish swimming around lazily. He motioned for us to pick a couple, and a waiter with a net deftly captured our purchases as soon as we pointed them out. Less than 10 minutes later, the fish had arrived on our table (along with a number of other dishes) and it was absolutely delicious. We stuffed ourselves there for almost an hour before getting back in the car and falling asleep on the trip back to Shanghai.

The walk along the wall (and the kilometres of walking we did the day before) had taken its toll, because after getting back to the hotel around 4, we all decided it would be in our interests to have an afternoon nap. We snoozed for about two hours before getting up and deciding upon a place to get beer and food. We figured we should get some Peking Duck since we were in Peking after all, so made a quick trip down to the local internet cafe to try to find a place. The first few places that I found ended up being dead ends (phones just rang out) so we decided to go back to the hotel and ask them to recommend a place. They circled a street on the map where we could go, and within 10 minutes we were sitting down in a restaurant. We got our Peking Duck (I'm not a fan, personally) amongst some other tasty dishes, and settled down to a cold refreshing beer.

The cold refreshing beer ended up tasting pretty damn good, so we decided it would be in our best interests to go find some more. We visited a couple more bars during the evening and ended up consuming far more than we had originally expected. Still, we ended up getting home by 2 since we still had one day left of sightseeing in Beijing.