( For those of you who do not understand swedish, here is my last post in english for you to read! )
My already long trip to Tokyo became even longer when I, after having waited at the Beijing airport for about six hours and then waited some more in a warm airplane, got to know that the flight because of a Typhoon in Tokyo had been cancelled. It was just to pack my stuff and squish back out of the airplane, back into the hot terminal bus and then go hang around waiting for the rest of the luggage. And then on to the ticket counter to wait in line some more -luckily me and Joakim, who seemed to be the only other swede “onboard”, got to this line quite fast- before receiving a seat on the first possible flight to Tokyo after the typhoon passed. Which turned out to be at 4.40 the next afternoon. Welcome to China! At first I was a bit worried I might have to spend the night and next day in the airport since I didn't have a Chinese visa, but no one checked and soon we had been sent with bus to a hotel where we received a dinner buffet and (finally!)- a shower. After trying to send out a couple of emails on the cranky old computer that was in the hotel I jumped into bed and watched some Chinese music videos before falling asleep. About time! Strangely enough I woke just a couple of hours later and wasn't sleepy at all. But it was way to early to get up, so I counted some sheep and forced myself to sleep a bit more before me and Joakim had an early breakfast before checking out and tossing our bags into the trunk of the waiting “taxi”.
The taxi was a small old car without safety belts and with no functioning air conditioner and broken windows (sadly not broken as in no windows, but windows that were impossible to open) = Hot! Behind the steering wheel was a small Chinese man who looked very happy and very friendly, but who didn't know a single word in English. Next to him was our “guide”, who in broken English told us a little bit about this and that. First they brought us to this Jade-factory, which we weren’t really interested in seeing but that seemed to be part of the deal. It was pretty cool, kind of interesting but mostly just boring. Then we continued towards our goal, the purpose of our trip. Never did I think when I got on that plane towards Beijing to transfer to Tokyo that Id get a chance to walk the Great Wall of China! Our “guide” followed us from the car to the entrance of the wall (about 20 meters) before announcing: “Okkeii, see you here again 11 o’clock!” So much for that guided tour, but it was nice of him to walk us to the wall, or we might have missed it… ha.
It was a perfect day! Sunny, but not boiling. Beautiful! From the point where our guide had left us we peered up towards the steep wall of stairs ahead of us, and sighed at the sight – a million Chinese people, Japanese people and other tourists of all kinds were squishing their way up the stairs. Yuck. We had a look around and in the other direction the wall seemed to be completely empty, although it didn't have that crazy Chinese-wall-wormy-way of moving upwards, although that might not be such a bad thing. Sadly it looked as if it wasn't possible to get very far in the other direction, but we still decided that we weren’t ready to join the crowd of tourists just yet and would instead check the other side out. And I’m glad we did so, because we found a little secret staircase that brought us to the empty side of the wall. Wonderful! We had about two hours to walk on the wall and that was a pretty good time considering we had been cleaver enough to bring about 2 deciliters of water, no more. We climbed tiny stairs of a couple of centimeters as well as huge ones. Slowly stumbling our way forward. And then there we were, with the Great Wall of China curling its way ahead of us, and with the green hilltops surrounding us. Fantastic! Even more fantastic considering it had been as unplanned as it can possible get. Just thinking of it makes me laugh. What a bonus!
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