The Great Wall is so amazing! It's surreal to think I was standing on one of the seven great wonders of the world! To get to the wall itself, you can either take a cable car up or climb 1,000 steps up the mountain. We made the climb and the the view from every step made the trek completely worth the effort. At the top, to see the expanse of bricks snaking across the mountaintops was like standing in a National Geographic photograph.
The part of the wall we visited had been restored for the tourists, and surprisingly there weren't many people there at all, which made us all incredibly happy. We heard later that other parts of the wall that other SAS groups went to were extremely crowded, so we consider ourselves lucky with where we went.
I was told that if you lined up all the bricks in the wall, they would circle the globe once and be 8 feet high. I was also told that the bodies of the people who died while building the wall were just built around, entombed in the Great Wall. Kind of creepy... :)
When it was time to go, we took the toboggan slide down the mountain (total tourist thing, but it was so much better than walking back down those 1,000 steps!). By the end of the day, my legs were so tired they would shake with every step! At the bottom, I bargained for my "I climbed the Great Wall" t-shirt, which I overpaid for at $3, and slept very well on the ride back to Beijing. What a day!
