Beijing, China [Part II]
Don’t wear heeled boots to the Great Wall.
It’s a lot steeper than you imagine.
This story starts with a quick trip to my third wonder of the world.
The Great Wall is about a 90 minute drive outside of Beijing.
We’re waiting at our hostel for the bus to pick us up.
Sometimes you can shop around for deals on tours to get a good price.
But we’re in China and we don’t speak the language so we just went with a tour the hostel offers.
I’d recommend shopping around.
If I was in South America or any Spanish speaking country for that matter, I’ll totally use it to my advantage and ask different places for prices.
Always use your resources.
Our tour group is about 8–10 people.
It’s the middle of January and most people are leaving the cities for Chinese New Year so it’s not too crowded.
We picked a tour that kind of explained some things for us in the beginning but let us explore on our own after.
First realization, we all know the Great Wall stretches for miles but when you’re in a tiny little part of it it doesn’t seem that big.
Second realization, these steps are steep.
I’m getting winded easily. How sad.
I’d say there were about 50 people at the Wall with us. We’re all spread out though.
Another tip: go on vacation with a good photographer.
I can’t STRESS this enough.
Going to all these beautiful places and without the right photographer and you’ll have no good photos to show people.
And people only ask you about your photos when you get back.
So pick someone good.
Naturally, people who selfie are good at this since they know all the right angles.
As funny as that sounds, pick someone who will take good photos.
That person is my sister.
She trained me to take this photo.
It was just practice since there are people in these shots.
We would wait 10–15 minutes so no one would be in our photos.
It got annoying sometimes but we were visiting on a slow day so there was no rush.
Also just fun to soak everything in while you wait.
After all the running around, having a mini picnic and hundreds of photos taken we had to head down for lunch.
You can either walk all the way up or take a ski lift ride up.
But on the way down there’s another, more adventurous option.
It’s a toboggan ride!
Naturally I wanted to do it.
Even took a video on phone by sticking the camera in my scarf.
It’s a vertical video and while these are generally frowned upon I really had no other choice.
I edited it down to that small clip because the entire video is a little less than eight minutes.
You can hear my chipmunk voice yelling at my sister.
There’s a stick that you can push down to go faster and pull up to slow down.
She kept getting stuck so I had to slow down all the time.
Hence, a long video.
So I cut it to my best shots. The phone would also fall so a lot of it is just scarf.
It was a lot of fun though!
While I may not have a funny memory from this day I did offer some advice.
Bring a good photographer and don’t wear crazy shoes.
You’ll regret both decisions.
Only four more world wonders left.
