Great Wall

On Thursday (5th) we took a tour out to the Great Wall. We decided to do this in a seperate blog as the section we went to is not strictly in Beijing, and we had too many photos we wanted to put up. Rather than going to the crowded and popular Great Wall section that is close to Beijing we opted to go a bit further out of town to the Jinshanling section. It is about 4 hours from Beijing and is one of only a few sections that has not been rebuilt and dates back to the Ming Dynasty. Our trip left at 6am(!) and we travelled in a rather squashy mini bus to the great wall. Once we arrived we hiked for about 3 hours on the wall which was pretty tough going in some sections but certainly worth while for the view. After the hike we sat down to the lunch included in the tour. It was pretty terrible, and even though we were very hungry we didn't eat much, even though we didn't have breakfast! We took a slightly larger but still squashy bus back and arrived in beijing at 7ish. Overall the wall was amazing, however we had a few reservations about the tour, but from other accounts it seems that they are all a bit like that.