Saturday 20 October – Today we went to the the Great Wall at Simatai, a two hour drive from Beijing.

Traffic in Beijing is horrendous so it was very difficult to get out of the city, lots of traffic jams and hold ups.  This despite the fact that they have five ring roads circling the city.  (Interesting Fact: London has just over 8 million people, Beijing has just over 21 million people).

Chinese drivers are totally crazy, they don’t follow any rules of the road, its just everyone for themselves, with people changing lanes constantly, pushing in any chance they get and horns sounding constantly.  So it was an interesting drive.

On arrival at Simatai we paid our entry fee, yes you have to pay to go on the wall.  We had a 45 minute walk up a steep path to reach the wall itself and then walked from watch tower two to watchtower 6. We then took the easy way back down on the cable car, which was a lot easier.

The wall is amazing you are in total awe at how they managed to build such a structure following the crest of one steep sided hill after another.

The views are amazing but the down side is because the wall follows the crest of the hill as it goes up and down, the wall itself is very steep sided.  We chose to walk up hill which might appear to be silly but walking down felt even more dangerous as there are lots of uneven steps, some shallow some very deep in depth, so there is less chance of falling going up hill. But it was exhausting work, so you had to have lots of stops to get your breadth back.

While on the section we walked the wall was nice and wide, there are for the most part no side walls to stop you falling off, if you are daft enough to get too near to the edge. So it was not a walk for the fainthearted.

Our Scott flew his drone, but before he could get any good video of the wall snaking its way across the hills an official told him to stop and delete the footage taken!!

One thing about China is how clean it is, you hardly ever see any litter and no graffiti.  There are people sweeping up day and night with their twig brushes everywhere you go, including amazingly one worker we saw on the wall.