i took a trip to china during golden week and now im writing about the adventures i had. if youre interested in previous posts, check out part one to read about my tiananmen square experiences and part two about the forbidden city.

__taking the bait__
it was a good thing we set aside an entire day to see the great wall - not because seeing it took the whole day - but because we stupidly fell for a scam that lasted the whole stupid day. being an american tourist who doesnt speak chinese in beijing has its disadvantages; one of them is being a constant target for scammers.

we left our hotel in the morning with full intentions of DIY traveling and taking public transportation to get to the wall all by ourselves. we planned to walk to a subway station, take a train to a bus station, and then find a bus to take us to the great wall. but as our luck would have it, that was the same morning beijing decided to close down some of its subway stations. with the sudden change of plans we decided to take the advice of our travel books and use a recommended tour group company for transportation. an hour later we arrived at the wall. so far so good. but we didnt know what we had signed up for until much later.

the first set of steep stairs

__the great wall__
the great wall of china was truly amazing to see up close. but it was even cooler to be able to climb up it and stand at the top. before visiting the great wall, i had been confused to hear about people climbing the wall. arent walls made to be unclimbable? growing up in vegas, where every house is surrounded by perfectly straight walls built on top of flat land, i imagined the great wall to be more or less the same thing - just bigger. in reality, however, the great wall spans five thousand miles up and down mountains and across rivers, deserts, and grasslands. there are many steep sections of the wall where "walking along the top of it" actually means "climbing up a mountain."
i must admit that out of all the places ive been so far, the great wall was the best combination of history, exercise, and beauty that ive been lucky enough to experience.
__the great scam__
it was a fun hike. the scenery was more than beautiful. the day had all the tell-tale signs of going down in history as a great fucking day. but that all changed when we left the wall to get back on the tour bus. it turned out that the trip was far from over. after the wall they took us to some lame tourist attraction. we found out later it had been a movie set to some old chinese movies we had never heard of. once we were thoroughly bored, they took us to the next stop on the tour. it was a building that tried really hard to appear like a jade museum. but after showing us a couple of impressively large jade stones, they ushered us into another room where they tried like hell to sell tons of jade crap to us. the next couple of stops were cosco-sized stores full of trinkets and souvenirs. my travel buddy and i didnt even get out of the bus for the last stop because we were so fed up with the whole thing.

when we finally made it back to beijing, the tour screwed us over one last time by dropping us off in an unfamiliar location with no actual bus stop in sight. after walking around aimlessly for a while, we eventually realized we were completely lost, gave up, and hailed a cab to take us back to tiananmen. all in all, the scammers didnt swindle any extra money out of us; but they did successfully steal quite a bit of our precious time and sanity instead.