Lianhuachi

Today we visited one of the most iconic places on earth, the great wall. I had selected the Mutianyu section to avoid the crowds. Jessie and the van picked us up at 9am and after cruising through Beijing motorways we ended up going in a narrow road traversing some farmlands, we passed some small towns with recreational facilities very popular among Beijingers. We finally arrived at Mutianyu village and got our tickets for the great wall, the village was really touristy with souvenir shops everywhere......

We used the cable-way to get to the wall (chairlift) and toboggan for the way down. The cable-way took us close to tower 6 and from there we went up the hill to tower 10, I don't have words to explain how excited we were, walking on the great wall had been one of my wildest dreams since I was a kid and now it was actually happening. The Mutianyu section is farther away than Badaling and hence less crowded, most of the tourist were foreigners (mostly Europeans), getting to tower 10 was a bit demanding due to numerous stairs up & down but the views didn't stop to astonish us.

On the way down we used the toboggan to add some fun time to the adventure, of course little Ximena was so excited, last time we did a toboggan was at the Big Banana in Coffs Harbour a couple of years ago.

After haggling a lot for souvenirs (sometimes prices went down from 500 to 40 Yuan!!!) we ate at a local Subway (yes the fast food chain) and then back on our Van, this time heading to the Ming Tombs. The winding road from the wall to the tombs pass through a series of hill with blossoming tress and small villages, overall the trip was close to an hour.

The Ming tombs are not that impressive. Other than a few artifacts from the emperors such as crowns and vest the buildings are not that marvelous compared to Forbidden city.

We left the tombs and run into some traffic on our way back to Beijing, yes Beijingers were coming back to town after spending most of the Sunday our of the city. We stopped at the Olympic Green to look at the futuristic constructions like the water cube and the bird's nest and then the Van took us back to the hotel.

For dinner we chose to go to a restaurant across the road from our hotel, big mistake, the menu was totally in Chinese with no photos and the waitress didn't speak English at all. We drew a chicken in a piece of paper and they told us that they didn't sell chicken so we understood it was a vegetarian restaurant. We ended up in another restaurant a couple of hundred metres from there, the waitress spoke really good English and had a Western menu (no surprises it was full of tourist).Read more