We climbed the Great Wall!
After our breakfast, which is now toasted toast with honey and Nutella, we took the bus to get to Lili’s home. There we met Zu, a former tour guide and perfect German speaker. Together we drove to the Great Wall at Mutianyu, about 70 kilometers northeast of Beijing.
When we arrived there Lili bought the tickets although we offered to pay for them. But it seems to be Chinese habit to pay for everything when you have guests. The ticket office is about three kilometers away from the wall, so we had to take a shuttle bus to get there. After the bus stopped, we separated from Lili and Zu because they didn’t want to come with us on the wall. So we took a cable car to the Great Wall and started to walk to the left.
Lucky for us today is Thursday so there were not many people on the wall, and most of them were tourists as well. While walking further away, we had to climb some really steep parts of the wall, but it was worth the effort. We got an amazing view over the wall and the landscape surrounding it.
On the highest point there was this sign:
Of course we decided… to get pass it. And we were rewarded with an untouched part of the wall which we continued to climb a little while. It was like a small adventure, we even met a snake on our way.
Before we returned we had a nice little break on top of a former watchtower, where we had an amazing view. See for yourself:
Sadly we had to go back.
Quite exhausted we arrived where we started and walked even a little bit further, because there was a second way to get back to the valley, which is a slide.
For 80 Yuan (12€) we enjoyed the ride, although we encountered some obstacles, meaning slower drivers. But nevertheless we had a lot of fun and met with Lili and Zu at the bottom of the slide, 4 hours after we started with the cable car. We hiked approximately 8 kilometers and were pretty exhausted. Here is a map of the geotags of our photos:
We then returned to the ticket office and drove to a restaurant where we had a very tasty lunch.
Filled and exhausted Lili drove us back to our meeting point, we were sleeping most of the time.
Till tomorrow
Alex and Lukas