Day 5 - The Great Wall

There are some places which deserve a visit because they've become a part of tourist lore. Today, we accomplished one such place. It was a great day with clear blue skies. We had read that the best way to get to the closest part of the Great Wall was to get to Qiamen on the southern side of the Tian'anmen area. It is on the blue #2 Subway Line, so getting there was easy.

We'd read about finding bus #1 if we were interested in getting there alone. An information kiosk, however, said it was now #919. While we were looking for those, we saw a ticket office on the side of the Railway Museum. Clearly that building was once a main station. It looked like it may have been built somewhere between 1900 and 1930. I'll have to check that when I have Internet access. Presently, I'm typing this out each day, with the idea of uploading when we get into a different hotel.

We asked a woman and were convinced to take a private tour bus once we haggled the price from R160 to R100. It was to leave a ten which shows how early we started the day. We got in and realized it was full of predominately local tourists. So, we didn't learn much during the hour and half trip there, but it was fun nevertheless watching a group of Chinese tourists from a different city.

The Badaling area of the Great Wall is only about 60 kilometers from the city, but the traffic would surely rival anything we've seen in Los Angeles. The wall itself was amazing and merits the 'must see' status it has achieved with visitors.

The bus also stopped at a number of 'selling' stops as tour buses often do. A jade factory outlet, a fruit and food exhibition, as well as a traditional Chinese medical institute were on the itinerary. It was all right as it was all part of an interesting day. We skipped the last stop at a summer palace as we hadn't done any research about it, and it cost an additional R45. We knew we'd be there only an hour and without a tour guide we'd not understand much. We just sampled life from the parking lot watching sellers, and drinking in the fact we were on soil in Mainland China.

The bus dropped us off away from the area we took it. It wasn't hard to figure that out as we saw the blue bubbly buiding and the red bird's nest we'd seen on television in the summer of 2008. We knew that a subway line ran to the site of the former Olympics. And we made it to the hotel just in time to order take-out food at 8:30 pm. I think I may be sore tomorrow from hiking up the seriously steep sections of the Great Wall!