Category: Ben’s posts

Today we visited the Great Wall of China. We took a 2 hour bus ride from Beijing to the foot of one of the parts of the wall which is open to the public. We took a chairlift up to the wall (because we’re lazy) and then decided to climb the steepest part of the section of wall (because we didn’t think it would be as steep as it actually was) and took a toboggan ride back down from the wall (because we’re EXTREEEME, at least until we got stuck behind the definitely not extreme really slow person about half way down!)

The wall itself is massive. It’s about 12 metres high and 6000 miles long (of course we only saw a small section of it) and was built over 2000 years ago by emperor Chin and was renovatedand extended during the Ming dynasty about 600 years ago. The bit we were on is only 600 years old (apart for the bits that were built in the 80’s while it was being restored). At the very end (at the top of so many steps…) it met up with some of the mega old wall which hadn’t been restored. That looked very old and overgrown.

The wall was built to keep out the barbarians in the north (so it’s a bit like Hadrian’s wall max) in this case the people to the north were the Mongolians (known as the Huns at the time) who ruled in China for a long time after the wall was built so I guess it didn’t work.

Apparently the original (Chin dynasty) part of the wall took 1 million people 20 years to build and at that time the population of China was only 5 million so it has to be the biggest failure ever! Though our guide seems to think that they wanted to stay is just an example of how awesome China is!

Mongolia is our next stop so I’m looking forward to hearing how they did it…

P.S. Sorry if the numbers are incorrect. The population of Shanghai seems to vary from 16m to 27m depending on who you ask so you might need to look it up and apply the same error margins! Maybe someone should comment with the real one?

Well, we’re here and my trousers have finally dried! All the green food colouring came out too!

We had a flight transfer in Hong Kong which was really fun, probably not as exciting as the old ‘fly between the buildings’ airport but it was awesome enough for us!

We slept for most of the first day and met our intrepid group and they’re all great. They’re mainly Australians but there are a couple of Swiss guys and another couple from London too. Our tour leader, Owen, is also really nice but certainly a man on a mission! There’s no stopping for photos on the organised tours, I managed to sneak a few in though!

Shanghai is lovely and MASSIVE (16.7 million people) but is basically just a big city with a lot of sky scrapers. Good food though.

On Tuesday we took the sleeper train to Xi’an. We were all in hard bunk beds in an open carriage with about 60 beds in. It was great fun, I didn’t get too much sleep though!

Xi’an is a totally different city. It’s got loads of character and lots of ancient chinese buildings, markets and city walls. Our tour guide took us on a very high speed and long cycling tour around the city. Unfortunately my bike didn’t fit at all and the gears were broken so I had to cycle all around the city looking like Easy Rider with the guide (on a very nice looking racing hybrid bike!) shouting ‘it’s ok, the cars will stop for you’. Most of them did.

Today we went to see the terra-cotta warriors with a different, much more relaxed, guide called Michael. He’s by far the best guide ever, I might have even learnt something!

Hi all!

Laura and I are setting off on our biggest trip yet on Friday 30th July!  We’ll be away for nearly 3 months and it will take us through China, Mongolia, Russia, Norway, Finland and a little bit of Denmark and The Netherlands.  I’m leaving Rocksteady Studios and have a new job at Frontier Developments in Cambridge starting in November.  Laura has a sabbatical from LIFT and will be going back afterwards but we’ll be moving to Cambridge and I’ll have a vegetable patch.

Amongst other things I’ve spent the last few evenings (while Laura’s been busy with the LIFT festival – getting her hair ‘cut’ by 8 year old children and the like) putting together a map of our travels.

We’ve been calling it Mega Trip 2010 so far but maybe The Kazakhstan Circular might be better?!

Here is the map!

We’re going to be adding blog/blab entries as we go along as it’ll be a lot easier for everyone than trying to make calls from crazy places!!!

Right, we’d better get packing…

Ben and Laura