Great Wall of China

Monday was our last day in Beijing, we would leave early the next morning and maybe we had saved the best to last. I was going to get to see the Great Wall of China. I can't express how amazing I find this trip. I keep having to look around and remind myself where I am and I think what makes it more amazing for me is that Anna and I put this all together, are still putting it together, ourselves. OK, so it's not difficult, but it is time consuming and takes a lot of research. One of the things I'm proud of is that the original schedule I wrote back in March is basically the one we are using with one or two changes. And I am going home to London by train from southern Vietnam. I don't think it gets much better than that!
We got the Metro to Beijing North railway station for yet another train, but hopefully this trip would only take us an hour. The train trip was smooth but not fast. One of the locomotives looked like a Japanese bullet train I thought. It turns out that the Chinese bought a French TGV train and then started making their own. Unfortunately the tracks haven't yet been built to support a high speed train. Just as well really, I don't need to get used to a fast train when the rest of my trip will be spent at an average 60km per hour. We went to Badaling, a town just 45 miles from Beijing and the easiest place to get to by public transport to see the wall. Of course we weren't alone but what do you expect when you go to see something like this. We got to the station and I think Anna and I had the same idea, we put our heads down and started striding away from the mass that had gotten off the train with us. It worked! Before a few minutes had gone by we were walking by ourselves. The wall is only 800 meters from the railway station, seriously convenient.
We got in and then wondered which way to go. I had been told that only a short stretch of the wall at Badaling had been restored and you could see an un-restored section here. There were no signs so I asked one of the women in the souvenir shop, she said we would have to walk past fifteen towers one way and twelve towers the other. In the end we just chose the stretch of wall that looked the quietest, I don't think either of us really wanted to battle the crowds. We made the right choice! We headed up, obviously stopping every second minute to take a photo. The countryside around this stretch of wall is fairly rugged and to see the wall adhering to the sides of the hills is so cool. I can't grasp how it was built, the kind of manpower it took, not just to construct it but to source the materials and to get them there. I couldn't stop looking and marvelling at it. Some of the wall is really steep, going up was fine but I was a bit worried about the return journey. Well I would deal with that when it arose. I got to the end of the section we could walk on and could see past the fence to the un-restored section. I really wanted to walk on it but it was blocked off, which makes sense but doesn't make me happy. And let's face it, it's all about me being happy!!!
We wandered back the way we came and went a little further past the point where we started. I had gotten used to not having to dodge people and so it was a bit of a shock to come up against whole tour groups. We did continue taking our random people photos. After about thirty minutes we gave up trying to walk anywhere and left the wall. We walked down to the souvenir shops and bought a beer and since there was no where to sit, we sat on the ground. Luckily it doesn't seem as if the Chinese have an issue with public drinking. More photos of us with random people followed, including some soldiers. We then trundled back down the hill to the railway station for the train back to Beijing. For dinner we had Peking duck at a restaurant near our hostel, the food was good and the beer cold. It was our last night in Beijing, our train left at 07.45 the next morning.