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Thursday 28th - day 8
Beijing
We get up for the tour at 6am and have an 'American breakfast' from the hostel - which was included in the price. The breakfast is unfortunately not as impressive as t sounds. The sausage is minuscule, there's 2 spoonfuls of scrambled egg, 1 rasher of bacon and 3 triangles of toast with jam - but we both eat the lot. We get the bus at 7.40 and have a few pick ups on the way.
It takes about 2 hours to arrive, the tour guide attemps to give us some information and history on the way, but his English is awful and nobody understands a word.
We arrive at the wall and apparently, if we do the 35 min walk up to point 10 on the wall, we won't make it the peak at checkpoint 25 as we have to meet back for lunch in 3 hours. We take the cable car (100rmb) with everyone else to checkpoint 10 as we want to get to the end of the restored part of the wall and view the unrestored part. The cable car offers a good view on the way up but it's unfortunate we couldn't do the walk up - feels like cheating!
We start the walk along the wall and even though it's overcast, the air feels so much cleaner here and it's still really bright. The wall is unbelievable. It's ridiculous how far in the distance you can see it sprawling up and down the mountain range. Lavish greenery and the blue tinge from the mountains add to the amazing scenery.
We make some Egyptian friends on the way - Mahmoud and tarik. They are both drs and in Beijing for a few days. Mahmood was pursued by tarik to come to the wall and he's not finding it an easy walk. To be fair, there's loads of winding up and down and a good half a k of upward steps, me and Yasmin are feeling the burn even after mt fuji! I end up linking Mahmoud on the way up and giving him a hand, tariks holding into the back of my backpack too at one point - this definitely wasn't mentioned in the tour description!
They are both lovely and chat to us a the way along (we end up donating them a bottle of water as it think they underestimated how
Long the walk would be!) tarik used to do tai chi professionally and he's running up and down showing us his moves along the way. When we get to checkpoint
25 - the highest peak of mutunyu he has us all doing tai chi moves and feeling energy. I'm convinced the hot air I can feel between his hands is just the sweat from the hour walk up hill we've just done.
We meet a guy called Ravi at the peak who is from Delhi and he gives us some good advice. We exchange details and hopefully we can meet up with him when we arrive in India .
The view from the peak is definitely worth the extra climb. There are trees lining the peak covered in ribbons which symbolise things like love, family, fertility. I take a family one and write mine and Yasmin's names on one end, and Michael and Kerry's on the other and attach it to a branch which has a fantastic view of the wall.
We also see itay on the way up as we are walking down. He tells us the walk up which was apparently 35mins took him 20 and it was really easy, so were abit disappointed we didn't opt to try the walk.
We spend the hour back to the bus taking pictures and posing with the Egyptians. Lunch is included and there's a good few variations of dishes which are really nice. We get talking to a Canadian couple who are off to do some voluntary work in Bali so we fill them in on our trip from March and give them some tips.
Once back at the hostel we are absolutely done in, and after walking for dinner - Yasmin got an ice cream and I ended up having coffe! We go to bed. We have a new roommate Regina from Hungary who is absolutely lovely. We make arrangements to all go Out on Saturday.
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