Thursday 17 September 2009

Beijing Express Sightseeing: Great Wall of China

I only had just the Friday after finishing the tradeshow and seminar on Thursday. So I had decided to do express sightseeing to the Great Wall, Forbidden City and Tian An Men Square. Morning we started our journey at 8am. I was joined by Peter the tour guide, a surly lady driver and May from Sunway Resort.

Great Wall is about 60km from Beijing, a journey which took about one and half hours drive because of the traffic. Traffic is quite bad in Beijing but it is moving traffic, plus Beijing have four ring roads, which all roads will take you about half an hour to go to any main area of Beijing.

We went to one of the nearer Great Wall entrance, the North Pass which is called Badaling, which literally means "arriving from everywhere", or so I was told. The walls were built such that people can arrive at the 8th tower from any direction. This entrance was the most popular and visited by most tourists, apart from Mutianyu or the Southeast pass. The Great Wall was built from the 5th Century, most famous when China's first emperor, Emperor Qin built it, continued by the Ming Dynasty. It was built as a fortification of the emperor's new frontier and against invasion from the North and Mongolia.

Gondola ride up to the 8th tower, much like the gondola going up to Genting

The 7th tower on the top was cut off by the huge mountain stone, so they built another way at the side for people to access. Below left is the 6th tower and front is the foot of the 7th tower

The climb to 8th tower starts from here

Fortunately the weather was cool, I guess about 15-17 degrees. I was fasting but I was determined to climb to the top to reach the 8th tower. We began climbing at the foot of the 7th tower, at first it was kind of easy because it wasn't slanting till we reach half of the way and it began to become very steep and angle is about 70-80 degrees...scary!

Going up...up

See the angle up? My guestimate it's about 70 degrees angle

I made it!!! The 8th tower at the backNow...how to go down eh? Very steep!!The Great Wall branching out to many different directions

Coming up, Beijing Express Sightseeing: Forbidden City & Tian An Men. Also, Beijing's handiwork.

2 comments:

hnyhar said...

waah bestnye nuwal..

Kerabu Jantung said...

ada tak jumpa adik beradik dan nenek moyang kat tepi-tepi the gr wall tu..