Chengde and The Great Wall

We had three days in Chengde, with no planned itinerary which was quite good as it gave us plenty of time to relax and just do our own thing. The first day I slept in and then went off to The Summer Palace, which was where the emperorfamily used to reside during summer. It was nice, old buildings with pinetrees in the courtyards, and a huge park around it. All the interesting rooms were locked up though, so you could only peer in through the windows, and the rooms which were open mainly had exhibitions of vases and paintings. Spent a couple of hours wandering around the park which was really nice, it had a big lake in the middle and lots of tame deers! It was a bit hot though, getting well into the 30ies by now.

In the evening we all went out for a hotpot, which was of course great (as all the food is), had beef and prawns and sausage and a really good peanutsauce to go with it. And they served silkworms as snax!! Of course I had to try! They were not very tasty, just crunchy and not very pleasant... Went to a KTV-place after, which is karaoke for those of you who haven't been to China, but it wasn't very good as there were very few English songs.

The next day I went off to a temple with Mike, Rachel and John, which was nice (although getting slightly templed-out by now...). But the special thing about this one was that it had the biggest Buddha in the world of its kind. It was 22 meters high, made of 5 different kinds of wood and stood inside a temple. It was massive!!! And it had 40 arms, each holding an item like a flower or prayerbeeds etc. I managed to loose the others and I thought they had gone out so I went out but they weren't there so I just waited for them and it turned out they had gone behind the temple and discovered an area with loads of padlocks all over the place. Quite bummed I missed that.

After Chengde it was time for some excercise! Which was good, as I've eaten far too much on this trip... So we went to hike the Great Wall. We started off in Jingchanglian (or something like that...) and hiked 10 kilometers to Simtai. It was a great walk, although quite tireing as it was well over 30 degrees and lots of steep steps both up and down. Seemed a bit meaningless that once we had climbed all the steps up to a tower we had to go all the way back down!! Made it to the other end in about 4 hours, so it wasn't too bad. Did another part of it the next day which was a bit more touristy and a bit more tireing actually, because it had soooo many steps going up to the actual wall! We walked about an hour, did my "Kilroy was here"-photos as I remembered to wear my t-shirt, and a few with Ant wearing his Dragoman t-shirt aswell, and then tobogganed down (typ aking i bane) which was quite fun.

Arrived in Beijing today, and tomorrow we're off to the Summer Palace and the Forbidden City. It's much less polluted than I thought it would be! Can't believe I'm going home on Friday though. Don't want to leave!!!