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Category: China

Tags: fadhel travel blog, great, wall, beijing, china, trip, slideshow, tripwow, tripadvisor, photography, vacation, photos

A TripAdvisor™ TripWow slideshow of a travel blog to Beijing, China by TravelPod blogger Fadhel titled "The great wall". TravelPod is a company of TripAdvisor™. Fadhel's travel blog entry: "As soon as I left the train station I knew I was going to love this place. We arrived on the 1st October which is the first day of a 7 day national holiday. During this week the Chinese all head to the big cities to see the sights - they absolutely love big crowds.So you can probably imagine, Beijing was even more crowded then it usually is with it's population of 22 million people. To beat the crowds we decided to go to the great wall early the next day.We also thought we'd go to part of the wall that less people go to (according to lonely planet). Tina, our local honcho took us to the foot of a mountain where there were no paths as such but there was a route through the plants with red arrows painted on the odd rock every couple of hundred metres. It would have been a tough climb had it not poured down the night before and had I wearing better footwear then my flimsy plimsols. It was certainly up there with the most challenging things i've ever done, but on reaching the top it was also one of the most satisfying. We were the only people on that section of the wall for the first half an hour until this old Chinese bloke climbed up with a coolbox tied to his back. We bought beer and water - perfect. This certainly wasn't the same place that the guidebook had recommended. The wall hadn't been touched for 600 years whereas the more popular parts had been restored much more recently. We were told that the Chinese citizens who were forced to build this wall had to carry the large bricks up the mountain along similar routes to that we'd taken. No wonder so many of them died. It was built to stop the Mongolians on horseback from attacking the Chinese. But I think if they managed to get through this challenging terrain on a horse then they deserved China. After soaking up the awesome views we were then faced with the matter of decending the 1000m we had climbed. So we walked along the wall for a couple of hours, until we reached a restored part of the wall where there was a cable car. It was the last night of the tour so everyone was up for one last supper and then getting smashed. We had a famous Chinese hotpot and finished any left over vodka from Russia and hired tuc tucs to take us to bar street. Bar street isn't actually a street but a lake surrounded by bars which can only be described as a tourist trap (one bar charged 18 quid for a pint!). I wasn't close to parting with my cash until we fell into a tiny backstreet bar where there was a dozen people enjoying pints for 10 yuan and an open mic night. I obviously got drunk and had a go. But not being a player of any instruments didn't stop me as I just went acapella. It could have turned sour, much like my effort in Riga, when not learning from the errors of my way I burst into another OCS tune. This time as there was no music I was able to u-turn quickly into wonderwall which everyone knew and loved (maybe). The next day I rushed around a few tourist attractions like Tiananmen square and the forbidden city - which is so big with 10000 rooms that you'd need a whole day there to get a decent look. This is where I got tricked into buying a painting - which i've sent home ma. The fact is Beijing is too big to see in a few days. You'd probably need a whole month. But theres more to China and it's off next to Xian to see why everyone makes such a fuss over the Terracotta army. It felt refreshing to be on my own again - I just have the small matter of a 16 hour train journey on the lowest of 5 classes - the hard seat (being national holiday everything else is booked up)." Read and see more at: http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/fadhel/1/1286037166/tpod.html See this TripWow and more at http://tripwow.tripadvisor.com/tripwow/ta-013a-623c-a6c3?ytv4=1

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