Monday 11th March
As you can see in the picture we are in China and have been to the Great Wall but all didn't go to plan on our day here. We arrived at the port of Xinggang before we got up at 5.30. We were booked on the tour that took the bullet train, went to the Forbidden City in Bejing and then stopped for lunch before driving to the wall. There were lots of coaches leaving the ship to do this trip. We were on coach 12 and there was a long drive to Tianjin Station. Unfortunately coach 9 broke down and the coaches behind stopped to help. After taking some of the passengers from 9 on and a bit more fiddling around we continued our journey. We hit many traffic jams on the way, it took 2 hours altogether and we got to the station 5 mins after our train left. Three coaches had missed the train so our guides went away to try and get us on the next that left an hour later but as they needed over a 100 tickets that wasn't possible so we were booked on the next train. That meant we had a wait of two hours in the station. Fortunately our port lecturer was with us so she kept us informed, unfortunately she told us we could no longer go to the Forbidden City as the gates would be closed! We eventually got on the bullet train to Bejing. It was very smooth, the display told us how fast we were going it didn't get up to its top speed on this short journey but did get up to 175mph!
Everything we saw all day we saw through the smog haze! It was even worst in Bejing. We didn't have time to leave the coach but drove around the outside of Tiananmen Square before leaving Bejing for lunch. Our guide told us that not getting out of the coach was probably better for our lungs! We were all very disappointed at losing our visit to the Forbidden City however.
After lunch we drove to the Great Wall at the Juyongguan section. We walked or rather climbed up the wall as it was very steep. It was very hard work and you had to stop to get your breathe back frequently, but we got through one watch tower and half way to the next. From there you got lovely views of the wall on the other side of the valley and into the distance. Even here there was a smog haze. This photo is one of the clearest and was taken from the highest point we got to on the wall , you can see our starting point was in the level area at the bottom.
It was then over 3 hours drive back to the ship and we arrived very tired at 7pm.