The Great Wall of China

When I awoke to get ready for the trip to the wall there was a text from Mike sent after 3am. He said, don't expect the girls too early. I didn't and got on with some blogging, but within an hour of the appointed time, they arrived bright and cheery. Changping is not too far from the the great wall, there being too access points at Badaling and Juyongguan. Badaling is closest to Beijing so is the most popular. To make matters worse the 12th September is the mid-Autumn Festival. This is a grand family public holiday in China, so the locals would definitely be out and about. We headed for the Juyongguan Pass.

Taxis are incredibly cheap in China. So the thing to do is simply hire one for the day. When not in use they will charge you about $5 per hour to wait for you. It is much more convenient and cheaper than the local bus tours. The advantage of the bus tours however is that you have an english-speaking tour guide.

We told the driver we would be an hour and we set off to climb the wall. I say climb, because you don't just walk along it. The wall was built as a defensive one and so naturally this worked better in the mountains. If you built a 50 foot wall on top of a very steep hill, then it makes it even harder for marauding to clamber over. However it made hard going for us poor tourists.

There were tens of thousands of people there that day. And probably on most days. In some parts the steps are almost worn away so you have to step on the outer edges so as not to slide back.

Grainne couldn't stay away from the curio shops. There was some good stuff there too. The more hard-nosed Suzanne wanted to to bargain, "Start at 10%" she would urge, but Grainne would offer around 80% of the asking price. As we went on her bag got fuller and fuller.

We climbed a lot further and longer than expected. But we were determined to get to the top near high point. I am not sure the photos show how steep it really was. The other thing that impressed, unfortunately, was the smog. Our stay up in the Ming Tomb reservoir area had been largely smog free, but out here it was awful, even though we were some 70km from Beijing, further actually than the reservoir.

We took a lot of photos, and I hope to catch up with the Irish girls online to swap pictures. On the way down I had a tap on my shoulder. It was Tiare Lund, the NZ team captain who won her age-group. Tiare however is more famous for her ironman exploits and she recognised my IMNZ shoulder bag. We had chatted before, but out-of-context she couldn't place me. She walked on up, and after a few minutes I suddenly said to the girls that I had let an opportunity slip, and I charge up the mountain after Tiare. She wasn't going slowly but I caught her and she looked somewhat startled. I pressed one of her companions into taking a photo of her and I. Hey, I can be a groupie if I want to. I mean how often would I get to be in a photo with someone like Tiare Lund on the Great Wall of China. I headed back down to catch the girls still haggling over prices.

Tiare and I on the Great Wall of China. A photo I will always cherish, such is my admiration of this lady.

I will use a selection of photos to tell the rest of the story. Of course I make no apologies for all the photos of Suzanne and Grainne. They are lovely :)