Early monday morning Wang picked us up and dropped us off at the same hutong we had spent the previous evening in. We decieded to hike (not walk) a part of the wall around 2 hours out of Beijing from Jingshaling to Simatie. We met up with our tour group from a hostel were we met 2 other westerner boys, from australia, from victoria, from belgrave...... Haha it was pretty funny then one of the boys thought he recognised me and we had eneded up doing the same undergrad course at Melb Uni. Small world. They were in china for uni break and were just travelling around. On the bus their the hike guide told us there were three parts to the wall. The start was the hard part followed by the middle part which was a harder part, followed by the last third which was the hardest part. She wasnt wrong either!
We arrived at the wall and unfortunately the pollution hadnt lifted, which was disappointing because again the photos havnt captured the true scale and awe the wall exhibits. We didnt have a guide for the trip instead they dropped us off at the start and would meet us at the end of the wall 2-3 hours later, therefore we could walk at our own pace. We walked with the lads from Melbourne, which was good fun bouncing jokes of each other and taking some humorous images. We witnessed 22 watch towers along the wall and the further along we got the heavier the fog got. We eventaully could only see 40-50m a head of us, resulting in walking and at the last minute seeing a stair case raise almost vertically into the abyss of the fog (a.k.a the stairway to heaven). The wall goes for roughly 5000km, we walked 6-7km which nearly killed us all with it ebing a lot more strenuous than we all had thought. As mentioned earlier the fog was disappointing but looking on the bright side of things it added a mystic feeling to the whole walk which was enjoyable and halfway along the walk the heavens opened. This was a good thing because it disguised the sweat that we had shed throughout the walk. The lads and i had a beer at one of the last watch towers, bought of an old fella pushing 65 who after taking out money, climbed off the wall into the bushes to gert to his hidden sash before clambering but onto the wall. One thing that did take away from the cultural experience was the continuous pestering of the locals along the wall trying to sell drinks and merchandise. Credit to them for getting themself and their shit to some of the locations but they were annoying.
