28th April. As one of our group of trekkers is a personal trainer in his
real life, he kindly did a warm up with our group every morning before we
started our trek, which gave a lot of amusement to Chinese onlookers, some
of whom even joined in too, this meant that our muscles were warm and
stretched before we started walking and prevented aches and pains.
This walk was on a largely restored section of the Great Wall, which…
27th April.
As we were staying at our mountain hotel for two nights we didn't have to pack up our bags, which was a luxury to me, as the whole packing my bag up every day was as big a challenge as the trek itself! Our bus took us on a 20 minute drive; we had to get a key to open the gate for the bus to drive through! We started our walk outside the village of Gubeiko, walking along farmland until our path took us…
Tuesday 26th April
We get up and make our pack our lunches and fill up a our water bottles yet again before the electricity and water suddenly fail. We have a lovely homely breakfast of porridge and then set off from the farmers' houses in the village.
Steep paths and terraces soon give way to rocky hillsides scattered with scrub. Eventually we rejoin the wall which is unrenovated, so is crumbling, so we follow a…
Monday 25th April
In Huangyaguan we had an early start with Chinese stirfry for breakfast or fried egg and jam sandwiches! We were given packed lunches of salad sandwiches made up with four slices of bread each, Chinese apples, (grown with a stencil over them, ending up with a beautiful Chinese design on when ripened, signifying good luck), bananas and peanuts.
We stacked up our water supply again and made our bags heavy…
Sunday 24th April
The Forbidden City dates back to the Ming Dynasty and was a huge city. It was very ornate and beautifully painted. There was a beautiful garden as we passed through with all the spring colours of Blossom out. We were there until it closed and the military very keen to get us all away as soon as possible.
We were back on the bus to our hotel and then told we had an hour to get ready for our evening meal…
