Wuhan to Beijing, and The Great Wild Wall

Eventually Thursday morning rolled around and it was time to end out river tour, which luckily ended the hour loop of Kenny G. songs that had been playing since we got on the boat. We hopped a bus from the docks back into Wuhan, but we still had a few hours to kill before our flight to Beijing that night, so we spent our time wandering around the old European portion of the city

A statue In Wuhan

and saying goodbye to our awesome tour guide Linda who had been with us since our first full day in Wuhan. And Thanking Steve Wilmarth again for finding us a new hotel after the communist party commandeered our rooms in Beijing.

Saying Goodbye to Linda and Steve

The part of Wuhan we were in mostly consisted of very high-end stores, there had to have been like five or so Nike outlets and a whole bunch of Addidas stores and all kinds of fancy clothing stores and such where ever thing was just as expensive as it would be back home, so I mostly spent my time here wandering around not buying anything while trying to avoid the sketchy hawkers trying to sell fake Rolexes and stolen shirts.

That night we caught a flight to Beijing and after a frantic hop on the 24 hour train that only runs until 11 pm and a crazy cab ride we got to our hotel, a small little place tucked away in a hutong, a kind of courtyard neighborhood right by the Golden Lama Temple, one of the largest Buddhist temples in the city.

We got up early the next morning and got on a bus where we met William Lindesay, A man who was One of the first people to walk the entire length of the Great Wall of China. And that afternoon he was going to show us A part of the wall not many people get to see.

William Giving us a brief lesson about the wall

After a long, steep, somewhat icy hike a mountain we reached what William calls the Wild Wall, an unrestored section of the wall that is extremely beautiful to behold.

Pictures and Sketch from the wall

It was still fairly cool up in the mountains of Inner Mongolia so After admiring the beauty of the wall the hike back down to William's Cabin was very icy and I managed to fall quite a lot, but the tough journey back was well rewarded with plates on plates of delicious dumplings and tea.

Some Geese I saw near William's Cabin. They were not happy