track our trek

i think we’ve taken our first and last group-guided tour in china…our trip to the ming tombs and the wall was quite a bit of fun…we had a nice group of 9 people, all of us eager to get to the big attraction…we expected some obligatory touristy stops along the way (anytime the tour package offers an all day tour, you know that includes a couple of side trips to money-spending traps…) before we even got to the ming tombs, we stopped at not one, but two jade carving factories! after 2 lessons on how jade is mined and carved & polished & how to distinguish real jade from fake & half an hour to “take a look around.” we finally made it to the ming tombs…interesting history…it’s where 13 of 16 ming emporers along w/ their wives and concubines are married. It’s a beautiful setting surrounded on 3 sides by mountains so there is only one way in (feng shui is very important here!) the tomb complex is in part a replica of the forbidden city (the city where the emperor lived his earthly life.)
after the tombs, it was on to a cloisonné factory and more hounding us to buy things before lunch…sigh. a quick lunch of chinese food (of course) and it was off to the great wall – finally! we spent a little over 2 hours climbing to the top of a very steep part of the wall in badaling…it took more than an hour to reach the high point of this one small section…i can’t imagine how many people died building this wall!
i think we all wished we could’ve stayed for a couple more hours on the wall at a leisurely pace, but alas, we were hastened off to feign interest in a freshwater pearl factory & hounded mercilessly to “try, try, try…come and have a looky, looky” after the pearls, it was a tea house for more tea tasting…dp and i had had it by that point & were rushing back to make our legend of kung fu show, so we ducked out and jumped in a cab to race back to the hotel.
after an hour of fighting traffic & getting lost and stuck in narrow hutongs (alleyways in old city) our taxi driver got us back 4 minutes late to discover we’d been left behind by our ride to the show! damn all those tourist traps! luckily, the show didn’t actually start until 7:30 and the guy showed back up after dropping the group off & was nice enough to give a ride to the theater after all. the show was fantastic…a mixture of ballet and acrobatics and martial arts. we were so glad we didn’t miss it!