What can you say about the Great Wall? It was amazing! I never thought I would be so excited over a wall but it's something I've always wanted to do and I still can't quite believe I've done it. The pictures say otherwise though and I took plenty! We went to the Mutianyu part of the wall, which is one of the less busy sections and has a lot of watch towers set out regularly compared to some of the other sections. We got a cable car up there which was a bit scary as it didn't seem too safe! I couldn't look down and I wouldn't let Ben take any pictures as I was scared he'd drop the camera!! This section of the wall went from watch towers 1-23. The cable car took us to tower 6 and we walked from there up to 14. Getting to 14 was pretty hard! I struggled getting up to 13 and didn't think I could go much further but I gave it a go and we got there. We didn't plan to go all the way to 2 but thought we'd have a wander that way for some pictures as we had plenty of time until we had to meet the tour group. Once we started though we just kept going! I don't know whether it was because it was a shorter distance but I did find it easier than the walk the other way. It was a lot more climbing though. We could have made it up to tower 1 but we were worried about how much time we had. Climbing back down was a different story, it was so scary and I was practically on all fours at one point! Our descent back down from the wall was by...toboggan!!!!! Whoever came up with that idea is definitely a genius! It was a little plastic thing with a lever between your legs, pushing it forward made you go faster and pulling it towards you was the brake. I was a bit scared before getting on it as I thought it might go too fast, but once I was on I was fine. Some losers in front of Ben were going so slow though so there was a big backlog we got caught up in. There were a few sections where we managed to get a bit of a gap in between so we could go faster, but it would have been good to choose your own speed all the way down.
We then had lunch with our tour group which was quite nice. I tried not to eat as much as I did last night (I must have been catching up on not eating so much the few days before but I ate that much Ben was calling me the foover - food hoover!)
Later on we were struggling for somewhere to eat and went back to the place where Ben had the strange meat, planning to get the duck I had got last time. Well, they gave us an English menu to confuse us so we picked out crispy fried duck and Ben picked some noodles. The duck arrived and it wasn't what I had last time. There were no pancakes or sides and it was just a whole duck, head still on, eyes looking at me, half a beak, not very nice! They'd literally just cut it up as a whole as well so I could see bits of spine around the meat and lots of bones - what's the obsession with bones!!!! Ben's noodles were in a horrible sauce as well although he seemed to like them. I barely ate anything, it was worse than the chicken bone meal! I had some crisps and M&M's back at the hostel. We leave for Xi'an tomorrow on the overnight train so check out is at 12 & we'll probably just hang around the bar til about 6/7pm. I'm going to try to upload some photos onto a picture website and I'm looking forward to having one of the hostel sandwiches again!!