Russia, China, Vietnam - August 2007 - Page 2 - danbrew's Photos- powered by SmugMug

This gallery contains photos and comments from the continuation of an epic journey traveling most of the world. I began this journey in January 2007 http://danbrew.smugmug.com/gallery/2252365/1/117546107) and for reasons too complicated to get into, never finished. I'm going to try again, though. I'll leave Chicago in early August on the same flight that I took back in January. I'll fly to Moscow and then travel across Siberia and the Gobi desert to Beijing. I've decided to add a journey from Beijing to Hanoi to see a little bit of Vietnam as well. Photos, posts, commentary & thoughts to follow...

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Gallery pages: < 1 2 3 4 5 6 > >>

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Part of the tour involved having dinner with a local family in Jinshanling. It was great - there were four people in our tour group (Patrick & Evelina from Sweden, Tim from Korea (originally from St Louis), and me from Chicago), plus we met up with another small group that were doing the wall on their own - I didn't get their names, but they were three graduate students doing their thing in China. Each of them were fluent in Chinese and we had a great time listening to them communicate with our hosts.

This guy is the grandfather - he was a very nice guy. I bought a table-top photo book of the Great Wall from him for about 120 RMB (about $15) - it's very very nice.

All in all, had a great time.

We slept on the wall last night - it was pretty cool. Who would have thought you could do that? Most tourists don't ever get to get this up and close to the wall - they simply plod along it in the daytime. We camped there in the open last night (although there was an enclosed space in the guard tower we could have used) and it was really wonderful to drift off to sleep looking at the stars and wondering about the generations who had slept in the guard tower before us. Wow!