The Great Wall is great

Last day of our Beijing holiday, me, Vincent and my mom, we were planning on going to the Great Wall. Of course, to be in China and in Beijing, the Great Wall is a must to see place.

To make it easy we bought an one day bus tour. Unfortunately weather forecast wasn't the best, but we hope bestanyhow. In the morning we went to the bus and the first rain drops starting falling down. After 15 min it was raining cats and dogs...

We stopped at another hotel to pick up more tourists. We were 11 persons, us three, one Mexican girl and seven Chinese fellow travelers.

We made a first stop at Ming Tombs. Very quick visit and nothing extremely spectacular, but interesting. After that we had lunch and during this lunch we saw how great Chinese people we had a chance to meet. They spoke very little English but somehow we manage to have a nice conversation. They were group of doctors. They come from a city close to Shanghai and they do not like Beijing cosine, therefore they brought some of their own food - a bag of dried small fish and a soup, or rathe a little plastic bag with some powder which the put into the big bowl of hot water. We were offered both fish and soup, which we kindly accepted with a smile on our faces :)

They were making sure we ate and drunk enough :)

When we got to the wall it was still raining, but much less. The first thing we did was to buy rain jackets which turn out to be made of a foil like very bad garbage bags. But we didn't have a choice and we took what was there :) They were in very bright colours, light blue, yellow and purple :)

We started climbing. You can definitely say that millions people has done the same. Some steps were 'sampled' by human feet. Some steps were very low and some very high, which made the

whole thing less easy. But nobody promised it will be easy :)

Here our Chinese friends showed again extraordinary politeness. One of them was carrying an umbrella over Mexican girls head and the other was waiting for us to make sure that everybody will make it to the top. One man took Vincent's hand and helped him to take the steps. Vincent though it was a lot of fun and got very high tempo and our Chinese friend held up to it. We got a bad conscious for that, but he seemed to enjoy it :)

After one hour we reached the top! The view was marvelous. High mountains and many kilometers of the wall throughout them. It was definitely worth the effort.

And right then, when we started going down we understood that going up was a piece of cake compared to going down. But Vincent again took the lead and almost run 'downstairs' :) We came 15 min behind :)

After we came down we had a great cup of coffee and Vincent had ice cream with his little Chinese friend :)

I want definitely to go back there, to see different part of the wall. And since Rodrigo didn't go with us this time, probability of going back there with him is pretty high :)