Day 17 - Monday, November 23, 2009 The Great Wall Beijing, China

Highlights

-       The Great Wall is awesome.  No mincing fancy words, it’s worth all the hype…and sore calves the next day.

-       Kung Fu shows in China filled with an audience of 99% white people and voice-over’d dialogue is worth a few bucks, but only for the crazy tricks the artists do.

The wordy birdie version

It’s Monday night and we’re in our room with Susie, Michael, and Tim (all Ausies) listening to our iPods and dancing  around our room waiting for the hotel security  to come bust us for having such a good time so late at night.  While listening to great songs, we’re also confirming that the music played such a big part during our wedding reception.  We’re dancing just like people did during our party.  Brilliant!

Last night after a relaxing afternoon (much needed after the chaotic Japan trip and before our even more chaotic tour of China began), we met our group in the hotel lobby.  Along with the aforementioned Susie, Michael, and Tim, we also have Susie's sister Ali, Linda from Australia but who lives in London, and Indra from Germany but who lives in Switzerland.  And we met our tour guide Frank, who's from Xi'an and has never left China.  8 tourists and 1 guide...seems like a nice sized group.  Everyone seems cool, and since half the group is 21ish and the other half is 30ish, the age range is quite even.

We got an early start yesterday and left for the Great Wall at 6:30am.  Arriving just as the wall opened (weird to say), our group was able to take the gondola up to tower 14 and walk all the way up (and up) to tower 20, all without encountering another tourist.  It really was surreal to be up on this epic tourist attraction and to be the only tourists around.  (Great call Frank!)  This enabled us to take unobstructed pictures of our trek.  On our way down, we realized how lucky we had been to be alone on the wall, for another wall had hit us…a wall of tourists.  By 11am, the wall was full and we needed to navigate around people from all over the world who were there to see what we had come to see, but with much more life trolling on this massive structure. 

Instead of walking down from tower 6, Tania took the ski lift to the bottom of the hill while I sped down on an alpine slide (or toboggan as they’re called here).  It was so worth the $5, frozen nose, and numb hands. 

Overall, visiting the wall is well worth it just to see for yourself a small chunk of what is sprawling across this vast land.  Not only was the wall a great deterrent for possible invaders (since the Mongols are no longer a threat), the peaks of high-elevation mountains on which it’s built will exhaust an enemy even before they get to the wall.  Tania saw pictures of how different the wall is in the west, but here in the east, it’s as impressive and daunting as we had imagined.

So on top of getting to experience this great wonder of the world (whether it’s the official 8^th wonder is up for discussion outside of China, but is more of a fact inside the country), we have buns of steel since the climb up to tower 20 is as good a work out as we’ve had in a long  time (=ever).  Having earned it, we simply relaxed in the afternoon and walked around town.  We did go to the greatest Kung Fu show in China (another self-proclamation), which had very impressive tricks integrated, but overall was a simple tourist trap there to thrill laowais (the local term for white foreigners with big noses) with what is supposed to be an authentically local show.  It was worth the experience, but maybe not the large ticket price.