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Category: China

Tags: great wall of china, 1968, expedia great wall ming tombs, ming tombs travel blog, ming tombs summaries, great, wall, ming, tombs, beining, liaoning, china, t

A TripAdvisor™ TripWow slideshow of a travel blog to Bei Jing, China by TravelPod blogger Penguinwrestler titled "Great Wall and Ming Tombs". TravelPod is a company of TripAdvisor™. Penguinwrestler's travel blog entry: "An early morning, just what I always want in a vacation!! We were to meet at 8:30am in the hotel lobby with the rest of our tour group for the start of our day. It's a difficult thing to complain when you're on vacation in Beijing, about to visit the Great Wall of China. Alas, how can I be expected to be 100% smiles and chuckles when I was kept awake for majority of the night by a 20 million strong army of pyromaniacs? Our first stop of the day, and a recurring tend as we were beginning to learn, was at a factory. This time Jade. We were given a brief history of jade and its many wonders. I offer you a brief summary: Jade is green. When polished, jade is shiny. In order to make people buy jade, jade industry employees will tout the magical healing powers of jade. Jade also cures cancer and single-handedly defeated Genghis Khan, Hitler, and the Toronto Maple Leafs through the years 1968-oblivion. The tour group was permitted to leave after enough people bought jade things. We now own jade chopsticks. A reasonable purchase compared to some of the things our other group mates succumbed to. One couple walked away with a $200 sphere of jade which will live out the rest of its life in the company of a cat in a window sill somewhere. The Great Wall is about an hour or so out of town. The morning was hazy; partly due to smog I'm sure. In all fairness it was impossible to tell what was ambient pollution, and what was caused by the expenditure of an entire year's worth of gunpowder stockpiling. Words can't really express the Great Wall. It's long. In parts it only rises six feet above the ground level, in other parts thirty. We were driven to a nicely rebuilt section of the wall. Winding up and down steep mountains and across deep valleys it's impossible to imagine just how many people worked on this wall and for how many years. The Wall itself was only half the wonder of the place. Arriving at maybe 10:30am the crowds were only starting to gather, but already the push was on. Given an hour and a half to explore the Wall Lyndsay and I decided to climb as much of it as possible. There was no beating the crowd. The stone steps had grooves in them inches deep from innumerable feet that had walked this way before us. I wanted to reach the top of the ridge the Wall was currently climbing, but as Lyndsay pointed out, then what? We fought through the crowd of loafers and those afraid of heights. When maybe one thousand people want to walk up and down a large staircase, it's a problem. When the staircase is narrowed down to one lane, its worse. The higher we climbed the better we could see that the wall just stretched further and further up. The two of us pushed on as far as we dared, but there was no escape from the crowd of Wall walkers, so we accepted defeat and struggled down, which was in any case, much more difficult than the way up had been. We learned something from this adventure though. If you want to escape crowds at a tourist attraction, stay off the beaten path. Sure walking up and down a large staircase is great, but there's always more to see if you look around. After scrambling down past people having a picnic in the middle of a staircase wide enough for only two people, we explored the grounds. It's amazing to think that a place can be crowded and deserted at the same time. The Wall was packed with tourists, but the temples and sentry towers all along were entirely empty. Although some of the buildings were in disrepair, it's not so hard to understand why. It took an army of slaves hundreds of years to finish this place. The cost to keep the place up and running would probably match the amount needed to building it in the first place, now that the people doing maintenance need to be paid. Having regrouped, it was time for lunch. One little snag though, the restaurant was conveniently situated on the second floor of a Cloisonné factory. Fro those at home who are like me, who have no clue what Cloisonné (pronounced claws-on ..." Read and see more at: http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/penguinwrestler/southkorea/1171799340/tpod.html Photos from this trip: 1. ": The Great Wall of China" 2. ": The Great Chain of Locks" 3. ": A Steep Climb" 4. ": Defence of the Great Wall" 5. ": Spiky Implements" 6. ": Lyn" 7. ": Temple" 8. ": Fancy Gate" 9. ": Temple Roof" 10. ": Roof Detail" 11. ": Cloisonne" 12. ": Kids" 13. ": Emperor of the Ming Dynasty and Us" 14. ": Emperor of the Ming Dynasty" 15. ": Ming Tombs" 16. ": Camels" 17. ": 2008...

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