Today we visit possibly the most well known tourist attraction in China, the Great Wall.

Its an early start in order to avoid the mental Beijing traffic and to ensure that the wall wasnt too busy and hot!

We arrived at the wall at about 9am and caught the cable car up to tower 14, the cable car ride took us high above some woodlands but because of the bloody smog we couldnt see a thing! once we arrived at tower 14 we headed along the wall through several towers, some of them had been used for toilets and stunk! A few of the towers had two floors but once again the smog ruined our view..

After an hour or so walking we reached the bottom of the steps that took us to our ultimate destination, tower 20! The steps looked incredibly steep and seemed to stretch for miles in to the distance, Sandy being Sandy decided to have a mental episode and sprint up the steps, much to the amazement of everybody else who seemed to be struggling in the heat!

Once we had all managed to reach the top we took a brief moment to get our breath back and compare sweat stains!

Yet again Sandy wanted to lead the way and we set off at lightning speed back down to tower 14, from here we headed on towards tower 7 where had the choice of either walking back down to the car park or taking a tabogan ride to the bottom.

With me being a wimp we decided to take a stroll through the woods back to the car park, we got a few funny looks from the locals who seemed quite shocked to see some western people.

Once we reached the bottom Sandy was ambushed by a local shopkeeper who dragged Sandy into her stall and wasnt going to let her leave with out buying something until a rather friendly Chinese lad helped to pull Sandy away from the eager shopkeep.

After our adventure along the wall we had a meal at China's renowed fast food restaurant, subway!

We took the bus back into Beijing and quickly visited the Silk Market, I got offered several Gucci bags but turned them down as they really werent my style! From here we caught the tube back to our Hotel, but as we had forgotten the directions Frank (tour guide) had given us we ended up guessing where we needed to get off and had to take a stroll through a busy shopping street.

When we finally reached the hotel we where both eager to shower thanks to the heat and humidity, we then had a quick check on the scales and the trek along the wall had swallowed up about 5kg's each!!

After a couple of hours down time we headed off out for dinner which was similar to the previous nights fare and we then went to see the Legend of Kung Fu at the red theatre.

The show was amazing and the monks are pretty mental, smashing stuff on their heads and doing all sorts of crazy stunts. Despite the amazing spectacle on display nearly all of us struggled to make it through the show with out nodding off due to the energy sapping trek earlier in the day...

When we arrived back at the hotel a few off us took a trip to the night market, sadly it was then closing but we got to see some of the bizarre foods on offer, such as snake and snails on sticks.