24.05.2011 – 24.05.2011  28 °C

Had an absolutely awesome day.

Spent the first day of my tour on the Great Wall. The wall is just phenomenal.. not just in size but in its location as well! The wall is built on top of this sheer escarpment and the scale of it is just incredible. At last count the wall was over 8000kms long.. that is the double the width of Australia!!!!! How incredible it must have been in its hey day???

Was a bit of a steep climb to get up to the wall but once you are on it, it is fairly easy going. The watch houses are spaced approx every 100m or so, so you get such a varied vista as you walk along the wall. Disappointingly the pollution was quite excessive today so the visibility of the surrounding mountains was quite poor. On a plus, the number of visitors to the wall today was quite low (at times we were the only ones walking along!!!)

The great wall definitely lived up to its name and was a definite highlight for me of my time in Beijing.

The afternoon was free so caught up on some rest and went shopping for tomorrow’s start on the Trans Mongolian (Mongolian at this stage Siberian later on). Apparently the food is inedible on board so spent an hour or so in the supermarket buying some staples to keep me nourished (probably not super healthy but fed) during the trip. I think by the end of the trip I’m going to be sorely needing a decent feed of steak and veges.

Spent the evening in the night market checking out live scorpions and snakes for sale.. Needless to say I didn’t purchase much to eat!! I draw the line at something either looking at me or still moving! Apparently snake tastes like chicken (one of the guys bought some)— doesn’t everything taste like chicken?? The scorpion tasted like the outside of crispy duck… the crispy bit (apparently).

Time to go to bed.. Am going to probably be out of touch for a few days so will upload photos and more blogs later in trip.