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The great wall and more babycakes.....

We awoke bright and early at 6am to be ready for Lily to pick us up for the great wall trip at 7am.  However, it turned out that she couldnt get the car to take us there because er boss was really pissed off with her.....might be something to do with her staying up drinking till 5am with us most nights, but im not sure.  After a brief panic, thinking htat we wouldnt get to see the great wall, we managed to get on the hostels trip that was leaving in the next 15 minutes.  Turns out that the place we were meant to be heading (Simitai) was a four hour drive and a 10km hike along the wall, but the place we ended up going (the name i cant remember for now) was only a two hour drive and you could hike as much or as little as you wanted in the four hours we had there.  This was a good job, as Alex's old man knee couldn't have managed the longer trip and as a result he wouldnt have got too se the great wall.

When we arrived at the wall, the heat was stifling, and the walk up to the wall had me and Ack pouring with sweat (not Al, as the lazy git got a cable car).  We also walked through Pestville, Tennessee before we got to the path with hawkers trying to sell you anything with the great wall emblazoned across it.  I managed to control my natural urges to buy cheap tack and we hit the wall with a Chinese American guy called Ricky and a Finnish martial arts guy who wanted to fight with a Shaolin monk while he was out here (sounds a bit weird, but they were good company).  The wall was spectacular!  Although it was very restored for the tourists it was still amazing to see as it winded up and down the mountains at sometimes ludicrously steep angles.  I think i read somewhere that over a million people died while building the wall, and now i can understand why!!  Apparently, a lot of these peoples dead bodies were also used in the building materials for the wall as well, although this may myth or legend.

We departed the wall by a toboggan run which was pretty cool as some of the sections were pretty steep.  I left the top about 20 seconds before Ackroyd, yet still had to wait about 2-3 minutes at the bottom for him to finish as he drives like a granny.  Might have something to do with the fact i ignored every single bloke by the side of the track urging me to brake for corners!!

After a quick bite to eat at the bottom (hideously expensive and revolting) we headed back to the hostel in our minibus with all three of us passed out in the back with our mouths open and Ack dribbling all over himself like a St. Bernard.

As it was our last night in Beijing, and maybe the last time we would see Lily, we decided to go for a nice meal in a Thai restaurant then head back to the Den for beers and another days cricket.  After a few cheeky beers and the rain delaying the cricket (hurrah!!), we decided it would be pretty rude to not go clubbing on our last night in Beijing.  Once again, we ended up in Babycakes absolutely smashed out of our faces, resulting in me pulling a fit blonde American bird (only cos i shaved for once) and Alex dissapearing off with a lady of the night!!!!

We got to bed at the usual time again and awoke the next day to find out we had missed our checkout time by 3 hours!!!  Muppetts.  We had to pay for half a nights accomodation much to my disgust and then quickly headed off to the train station for our 12 hour train ride to Xi'an in the Central province.

We arrived at the train station to be surprisingly greeted by Lily (who cried when we left - god we are great).  The train station was pretty nice and not surprisingly, so was the train.  We spent the first few hours on the train chatting absolute nonsense before retiring to our top bunks (3rd tier) for an early night as we arrive at 6.30am tomorrow.

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