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 took us
from Jinshanlin towards Simatei. We started off where we left the day
before, heading up the carefully restored steps into the mountains for the
final time.
There were some sections of older bricks and some dirt
tracks, but a lot on good flagstones. The scenery was superb, with
rolling purple hills fading into the distance in all directions. We
climbed up and up and up, but enjoyed the wonderful views of the Great
Wall as it clung precariously to the rock face opposite, dotted with many
Watch Towers and classic "scales on dragon's back" scenery. We stop many
time just to soak in the views to keep these etched in our minds for ever
and during the tough times help each other on and remind ourselves how far
we have come on our journey, both in a physical sense and emotionally.
At the end we find a café selling ice-cream, so I chose to have mango, but
there was an option of pea ice-cream for anyone partial to that flavour!
We then drove on to our hotel in Mutianyu, which although was basic
accommodation gave us one of our best meals and topped it off with a
birthday celebration for one of our trekkers with a huge cake, a gold
crown and a Karaoke party. The Karaoke was a challenge in itself as most
of the choices were in Chinese, but we did find a few English titles, so
everyone joined in for a fun-filled evening.
