The wall

The wall, isn't it nice?
So long and high and wet and windy and traitorous. I could sit here and use my powers of storytelling to tell a wonderful tale of my great adventure climbing the Great Wall of China, instead, i am going to confess. I had a total freak out, lost my marbles and couldn't do the climb. There were zillions of steps, steep steps with no hand rails, I just froze, thought I was going to throw up and chickened out.

But ... I did take the above photo, and you may wonder how? Well, my fear of heights is somewhat modified if i am in an enclosed space, so I walked back down and plucked up the courage, after giving myself a stern talking to, and jumped in the cable car to the top. I was dizzy, sweating and generally nauseous, but i made it. I did think that i was going to die at least once, but i made it! And it was worth it, the views were amazing. It was so stunning and awe inspiring.

We had a long drive back to Beijing and also a long wait for the real climbers to come back from the wall, so over all I spent about 7 hours in the minibus, some of the other came back early also. so we just chatted and had some food. As you can imagine after 7 hours of sitting on my ass while the others did a 10km hick didn't go well for my importance when it came to deciding what we did for dinner.

Talking of food, the food here is amazing, I was in McDonalds yesterday, KFC today .... only kidding. Our guide called Merrick, yes like the elephant man, poor guy, but he chose it. Chinese people who interact with tourists tend to give themselves English names, like Dave, Patrick or Sam. Anyway he brought us to a couple of places and picked the food. It was lovely, just so darn tasty.

The group I'm with seem pretty cool. There's 12 of us, four couples, two from Aussie land, one from Kiwi land and one from Canada, there's a single Swiss woman who i am sharing with, an English guy who is more or less doing the same trip as me, and a Norwegian guy no-one has seen yet. They all seem nice, the couples are all a bit older in their 50s - 60s. My room mate's a bit dull, she doesn't drink, doesn't like going out, likes getting up early in the morning and loves the countryside, we are a match made in heaven! But maybe i am just bitter and twisted.

I really like it here but there is something kind of creepy about all the wealth in a so called communist country. All the big shopping malls, big cars, regulated holidays, clean streets etc ... i don't think if I had a choice I would swap democracy for that. And I found a very interesting article in a Chinese English language paper about how the Chinese government had liberated the people of Tibet from the tyranny of the impostor Dalai Lama. it was a new twist on the story I had never seen before. When you watch the news it's all good news, never anything bad, or if it is bad it's how it was bad and now it's good. For example they won't report the big fire but they will report how everyone was rescued. It's a very subtle form of propaganda. And creepy. And it makes me very angry that they won't do anything to stop what's going on in Burma, one word out of China and the Burmese government would stop.

Today i went to the Lama temple, which is the largest Tibetan monastery outside of Tibet. It was lovely, so peaceful and pretty.

There were no monks though.

Tonight we are going to the Beijing Acrobatic performers, I hope it'll be good, we had a choice between that and the Peking opera, we all went for the acrobats, I think that the opera is an acquired taste.