The Great Wall - day eight

Today's blog was written by Paul Cunningham from Tambellup.

Today we are heading to the Great Wall of China. A few of us are a little tired after a hard night of trade negotiations at the Yanjing Brewery.

On the bus, our guide Linda informed us that flats in Beijing are very expensive. On average a 60sqm flat costs about half a million USD.

Another interesting fact was that because of China's 'one child policy', if you had a second child you would be fined around two years salary!

In terms of industry, it was interesting to hear China is starting to outsource manufacturing as the average age of people working in factories was more than 50 years old.

On the way to the wall, some of us were able to inspect the welding seams of a semi trailer as it pulled out onto the highway at high speed and came very close to the bus!

When we arrived at the Badaling section of the wall we were given a brief history lesson. The wall was started around 700 years ago and is around 5,000km long - around the same as driving from Perth to Sydney!

Around one million people worked on building the wall, and unfortunately nearly half of those workers died during the construction.

We took a small gondola style cable car up the hill to the wall, where we got to know each other very well squished inside the car!

We spent around 45mins walking up and down on the wall, before it was time to head back to the bus.

We then headed back towards Beijing to visit the forbidden city. We found our driver was highly skilled in driving down back alleyways... In fact until now I didn't know you could get a car and a bus past each other in a three metre wide space!

They started building the forbidden city in the year 1406 and took around 40 years to build and tkes up around 72 hectares. The city has 9999.5 rooms because the Chinese believe heaven has 10,000 rooms and the emperor is the next closest to god. 

It was also forbidden for a common person to entertain he city as it house do he emperor. The main buildings of the forbidden city run along the meridian line and has housed 24 emperors since completion. 

We headed back to the hotel to freshen up before going to dinner at a traditional Chinese house. The food was exceptional and plentiful with many of us struggling to get through all the courses. 

We caught taxis home which was a new experience in its self - we couldn't get out fast enough!