My Weekend at the Great Wall of China

I spent the weekend in a small farmhouse near the Great Wall of China. Actually the compound used to be the village schoolhouse. It consisted of a bunch of bedrooms (that used to be small classrooms) around an open courtyard.

It was a nice way to spend the last weekend of my trip. Other than getting up every morning at 3AM to go on a 5-6 hour hike, the weekend consisted of sitting around drinking beer and eating salty peanuts, napping, and generally getting pampered.

Our host/guide was William Lindsay, a Brit who has been living in China for the past 25 years doing research on and studying the Great Wall of China. He and his wife Qi and her brother-in-law Dragon (who did pretty much all of the cooking) pampered us very nicely for 2 days. And my greatest surprise and joy of the weekend:

No you are not imagining things, that is a French Press. The first one I've seen in almost 3 months and the best coffee I've had all trip. (Here at the hotel in Beijing they serve instant. Yuk.)

The village where we stayed was in a valley that was surrounded on pretty much all sides by mountains ringed by the Great Wall. The wall hikes we did were in the same neighbourhood as the trip I did back in April, with the Hutong School. One hike was to the west and the other to the east. So I am now pretty familiar with this stretch of wall.

The first day there was a light rain. It wasn't too much of an inconvenience, although it made some of the rocks pretty slippery, and I was soaked by the end of the hike. (And even the next day, which was clear and sunny, the brush was still wet from the previous day's rain.)

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The second day was sunny and clear.

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I'll post the pics separately since I'm having trouble with my Internet (as usual!) here at my hotel. The farmhouse had no wifi or Internet of any kind, it was the first two days in China where I wasn't frustrated and cursing slow and intermittent Internet.