You all know the Great Wall of China. But, have you ever heard about the Great Slide? If not, read on.
Jeff, Tony’s photo-bombing cousin (below) and long-time Beijing resident, invited us to join him and several of his friends to do an overnight stay at the Great Wall of China.
As you can imagine, there are several places you can go to visit the Great Wall, but we went to Mutianyu (about 90 minutes drive from Beijing) which featured a “village” of ancient Chinese-styled houses that have been renovated and modernized into vacation rentals. What a brilliant idea! It was conceived of by an American architect who married a Chinese woman.
Initially, I thought that visiting the Great Wall was a requirement – one of those “checklist” travel things one has to do – but doesn’t really make one’s travels more interesting than they already are. However, walking on an engineering feat that stretches for thousands of miles and took thousands of years to build (it was started over 2500 years ago!) is very awe inspiring.
Small steps, but steep!
We’re all smiles here, but what you don’t see is all the huffing and puffing before and after we took the photo. Those steps will get your heart pumping!
Quite picturesque at dusk. This was taken looking out from the Great Wall:
Some more impossibly steep steps:
… you also encounter some moments, like watching the drinks vendors pack up their entire store on a makeshift backpack (heavy!) and walking the ups and downs of the wall to get home. Or random Chinese people suddenly sitting next to me to take a photo with the ‘bai ren’ without asking…
And if the Great Wall isn’t enough to delight you, Mutianyu features what we call the Great Slide. It’s a giant toboggan course where you ride a sled and slide from the top of the Wall all the way to the bottom of the hill, good for at least 5 minutes of fun!
Here’s a video of what it’s like:
After a few hours of hiking the wall, we went back to our rental villa and ended the day with a wonderful pot luck dinner with our new-found friends. What did we eat? Tony’s famous sliders, BBQ corn, chicken wings and pasta. We ended the evening by playing Texas Hold’em 🙂 East meets West! I wonder what the ancient Chinese people who once lived there would think if they could have seen us 🙂
Speaking of which, here we are playing online poker on our Apple devices. Yes, we’re a bunch of Apple fan-girls … and we were not posing in this pic:
Here’s a slideshow of the whole set of photos:
[flickrslideshow acct_name=”tony-chen” id=”72157625094763696″]