This it it, one of the highlights of our tour. We are all on the bus at 6am to drive about 90 minutes or so to the Great Wall. Today is the Chinese National Holiday so the idea of getting going early is to try and best the traffic do less time driving and more time at the wall. It's cold, about 10 degrees as we set off. We are given a little breakfast pre packed by the hotel. Not good, 2 stale rolls, a bruised banana and a boiled egg and bottle of water. We gave about 30 minutes to go and we hit the traffic jam, we keep moving but pretty slowly and to add to that it is raining' Angie said that this road is terrible for traffic, it's the road that takes you to Mongolia. One year there was a traffic jam that took 7 days to clear. Don't quite get that but food vendors set up along the road to keep the drivers fed. It was a huge carpark with nothing moving. This was before they built a new highway. We arrive just before 8 and once given instructions of time and where to meet we are set free. We are already 4 towers up the wall in this section and the top of the section is tower 13. We have 2 and 1/2 hours. Tower 10 will be a good achievement given the weather and the climb. It's so steep, some of the steps are my knee height. There are already a lot of people making their way up the wall. We get to the 8th then 9th tower and it's been pretty hard. After this the number of people thin out and it gets steeper. The rain is quite heavy now and it's very cold. We get to tower 10 and Glenn says we won't go any further. I convinced him to go just a bit further to get some better photos. It kind of leveled out a bit, the steps not so high and some paths rather than steps. We got to 11. The rain had eased so we kept going. Well no point getting to 12 when there's only 1 more to go. We passed Angela and Ian as they were coming down so we kept going to 13. Great achievement, great view. Well done us! We spend a bit of time there and enjoy the feeling with Bethan, Karl and Nigel. Now to go down. Took us about an hour to climb up and about 40 minutes to go down. Going down was hard with the deep steps. At the bottom we had the most deserved cup if coffee and it was good! We were wet, cold but very satisfied and pleased with ourselves. Then to the jade place. The larger manufacturing jewel and ornamental stuff in Beijing. Hoot Hoot. Mez was lucky enough to have $30k necklace on and automatically received a leach who followed everywhere to give her assistance. Thank god she decided against the little girls room. Luckily she was able to pull free of the sticky little creature so we could go upstairs to another Chinese meal. Very similar to each for the two weeks. Then downstairs again through the sales arena where Mez had her evasion skills well on track by then and she got out. Well done Mez. Then a quick stop in pouring rain to take a few snaps of the Olympic Games Birds Nest arena. Every day thousand go there and pay to have a look at the structure. Now back at hotel getting ready to go to acrobatic show prior to dinner and you guessed it. Another Chinese meal. Rice, chilly, lemon chicken etc. stick the duck. I am way way over that boney ****. Hope I get another opportunity to share on this blog soon but I doubt it. Bye for now. A little postscript to the story today. The Acrobatic show was sensational and the dinner was at a local restaurant and the food was tasty and different and the company was great. A wonderful ending to an amazing day.