A pleasant stroll

We drove to the Jinshanling section of the Great Wall this morning and set off on our 4/5 hour walk. The Great Wall is split into various sections; the most popular with tourists is called Badaling. We went to Jinshanling and Simatai which are less visited. NOT surprising - it damned near killed us, well, me anyway. The wall consists of new and original parts and the original (un-renovated) parts were pretty hair-raising. At times there were no sides to the walls and steep drops. Hawkers; local farmers, each seemed to assign themselves to one of us at the start and helped some of us along (with the expectation at the end that we would buy some crap souvenir from them). At parts it was so steep we were literally on our hands and knees climbing up rubble. My hawker man who looked about 50 was nimbly skipping along and dragging me with him when it got tricky. Matt had a 70 odd year old lady offering him assistance which he declined; she was so tiny he would have flung her over the edge had he grabbed hold of her. And he didn't need any help of course.

Anyway, having lost a fair amount of sweat and limb function, about 4 hours and 12 km later we finished our walk; Susan the tour leader had barely broken a sweat. We ate dinner and collapsed into the bus for the ride back.

I forgot to mention that actually the scenery was spectacular from the Great Wall; it's just a shame that we couldn't appreciate half of it as we were clinging on for dear life!